This episode is the second installment in The Magnus Archives, and it picks up right along where the first one left off. We follow Joshua Gillespie as he tells the listeners about an occurrence in his past. To make a long story short, he’d been having quite the time with his friends: they were all recent graduates and decided to celebrate with some less-than-sober adventuring and fun. Joshua describes how he woke up one morning and decided to go “out alone that morning,” letting his friends nurse their hangovers while he watched the beautiful Netherlands sunrise. However, he soon realized he’d forgotten both map and guidebook, and with an hour or two, he was entirely lost.
Joshua meets a man at some point along his journey (who introduces himself as “John”); however, Joshua seems to believe something is odd about the man, describing him as having an “odd density” and is unable to recall the man’s appearance in its entirety. “John” proclaimed to be from Liverpool, though Joshua couldn’t distinguish an accent from the man. At some point, John offers Joshua £10,000 if he’ll just stay here and wait for John’s friends to deliver a package. All Joshua has to do is look after the package for John. Joshua agrees, and yet no package ever comes.
A year later, Joshua decides to finally use the money he’d been given to rent a single-bedroom flat. Strangely, only a week after moving in, Joshua says that two burly delivery men visited him, saying they had a packaged addressed for him. They left as soon as it was delivered and answered none of Joshua’s confused questions.
The package had no return address, and so Joshua resolved to open it. Within the large box was a coffin wrapped with a large chain and padlock with a key inside. Even stranger, Joshua found a note from John that was so lovingly signed, “Delivered with gratitude, J.” On the coffin itself, the phrase “Do Not Open” was scratched into the wood in large letters. Joshua indeed decided to not open it once he deduced there was no corpse within the coffin. Thus, he moved it to the living room.
The coffin made Joshua, understandably, antsy. One day, he placed a wine glass on the coffin which caused a strange scratching noise to sound from within the coffin, and it did not stop until the wine glass was swiftly removed. Rain caused a quiet moaning sound to come from inside the coffin, almost like singing yet muffled. After the arrival of this strange deliver, Joshua began suffering from nightmares, but upon waking, he found he could not remember them despite the panic that continued to linger in his lungs. And every time he woke up, the key would be in his hand, far too close to opening the coffin. He went as far as freezing the key in a bowl of water so that the cold would wake him before he could grab it.
Over a year passed since the delivery of the coffin. When he woke up, Joshua found that the coffin was not moaning as it usually did during the rain. A knock came at the door, and opening it revealed the same delivery men that had brought the coffin to him in the first place. For some reason, the delivery men were surprised to see Joshua and greeted him in an almost friendly manner, telling Joshua that John sent his hopes that the coffin hadn’t been too much trouble.
Joshua gave the two men the key to the coffin. When they walked into the living room–where the coffin continued to sit–Joshua did not follow them. When the screams began, he did not know who they belonged to or why the individual was screaming. All he knew was that when the delivery men took the coffin out, their van happened to read “Breekon and Hope Deliveries.” Joshua didn’t know what this meant, and he did not resign himself to ask. At the very least, the coffin was gone. It was out of his life.
This episode does an incredible job of creating a chilling atmosphere. Throughout, it is very clear that something is wrong with this coffin, and yet we remain just as clueless as Joshua. Listeners really start to understand that there is an incredibly vast well of information waiting to be uncovered in this episode as Jonathan Sims dives deeper and deeper into the archives of the Magnus Institute. At this point, it would not be remiss to believe these happenings as just some folktale or urban legend, yet we get the feeling that something more sinister is at play. Something tangible and real, something beyond a simple fairytale.
Joshua here seems to be a very non-typical horror protagonist. He wanders off on his own and gets lost, talks to a strange man, and accepts money from said strange man, sure. These are quite possibly very dangerous things for someone who is alone, though Joshua did admit to being less-than-sober. Regardless, what Joshua doesn’t do is investigate. Everyone knows the classic horror-movie vibe of an audience yelling at a protagonist in frustration because they continue to willingly put themselves in danger by not hiding or by investigating something that is clearly out of their league. If you recall, there is a GEICO commercial that even makes fun of this trope. It goes a little something like:
“Should we run to our car and try to get away, or should we go hide behind that giant wall of chainsaws?”
“The bad guy would expect us to run to our car and try to get away! We should hide behind the wall of chainsaws. Surely that is the safest option!”
It isn’t a secret that horror protagonists are very often, for lack of a better term, pretty dumb. It is quite literally the leading cause of death in horror films.
However, Joshua does not follow along with these tropes. He receives a coffin as a delivery that is chained and padlocked, and on the coffin is a scratched message of “Do Not Open.”
And what does Joshua do? He nods his head, crosses his heart and does not open the coffin.
The coffin did continue to behave… weirdly, despite his caution, however. Perhaps Joshua could’ve tried disposing of the coffin, but at the end of the day, Joshua kept his nose where it belonged, so to speak. The coffin acted weirdly enough without his interference, so clearly there was no reason for him to incite any more weirdness by ignoring the message scratched upon the wood.
It really is an interesting path to go in a horror series, even if it is only one episode. Most horror stories would’ve had Joshua opening the coffin the instant he pulled it into his living room, and yet that isn’t what happened here. Perhaps that’s the only reason Joshua did live, seeing as there was manic screaming when the delivery men returned to take the coffin with them.
If anything, this story reinforces the idea that, if we are ever in a horror-movie situation, maybe don’t be a hero.
