| ATTENTION! SPOILERS AHEAD!! This article contains information from later episodes of The Magnus Archives and may contain major spoilers for the setting and plot. Continue at your own risk. |
Annabelle Cane is an avatar of the Web. As the architect of the entire plot of The Magnus Archives she is also the true antagonist of the series.
Description[]
Annabelle is described as being a young, thin, Black woman with dark brown skin and short bleach-blonde hair. In MAG 69 she is described as dressing like “a vintage clothing store exploded on her”, and that she is variably tall with occasional extra eyes. After the events of MAG 69, one side of her skull is caved in and on subsequent appearances, she has “a mass of white thread criss-crossing all over the side of her temple”. In MAG 123 she is described as "rail-thin". In MAG 194, Annabelle is hesitantly described as looking "normal" but is noted to have a mass on her head, which was tentatively assumed to be a strange-looking wool hat. She is also able to adopt a more spider-like form.
History[]
Early History[]
Note: All information on Annabelle's youth comes from her own written statement and within this statement, she raises the possibility that her story is simply a fabrication as part of some bigger manipulative scheme. This disclaimer of course applied to itself, so there is no way to verify the accuracy of any of this.
Annabelle claims to have been born in Hunstanton as one of the youngest of eight children. She quickly learned that she had to lie and manipulate in order to get what she wanted and learned much from her mother, who wielded guilt and anger with surgical precision.
Eventually, Annabelle ran away, thinking her absence would destabilise the entire family and allow her to claim her place as the most important child. She hid in a broken down chip shop and encountered a young woman seated at an old fashioned loom. Her arms and legs were covered in track marks, the threads of the loom were laced through her skin, and dozens of spiders ran up and down the threads and scurried through her skin.
The woman looked at Annabelle and then looked up at the ceiling. Annabelle followed her gaze and saw something that made her flee back home immediately. The most she will say about it is that when a spider reaches a certain size, “it is often not entirely made up of spider anymore."
Arachnophobia Study[]
This incident is supposedly what caused Annabelle to have such a terrible fear of spiders that she would eventually end up volunteering for the arachnophobia study at Surrey University, sometime before November 2010. These events are more verifiable, as they were precured by the Archivist from a witness. She was the psychic "receiver" for other people's fear, stimulated by watching videos of spiders. She began to have dreams about spiders crawling on her. The experiment appears to have invoked the web to cause Annabelle's apotheosis as an Avatar. While this was presumably inadvertent on the part of all participants, it was likely directly caused by Mother of Puppets.
During the study she appeared very tall and displayed the ability to control other people. She displayed this ability by controlling all the participants of the study and by forcing Darren Harlow's hand to strangle him. Graduate student Mark Voight cracked her head open on the wall, and inside it was empty except for spiderwebs.
Visit to Neil Lagorio[]
In 2012, Annabelle arrived at the house of Neil Lagorio, initially being mistaken by Lagorio's caretaker as a film student. However, Lagorio, who had been affected by The Web to lose his ability to move on his own, then came into the room where Annabelle was sitting under his own power. He called Annabelle by her name the moment he saw her, and she commanded his caretaker, Alison Killala, to head to his screening room and wait until they were "all done here." Lagorio seemed to dance and cry tears of joy as Alison left, and five months later, when Alison had been knocked out of the stupor that Annabelle's commands put her in, she found Neil dead in a silk cocoon, and Annabelle commanded her to take his original cuts and make a statement to the Magnus Institute.
Chelicarae[]
Around January of 2015, Annabelle reached out to a freelance web designer named Gregory Cox to create a site called Chelicarae, where users could make a thread. The title of the post was meant to be the name of someone the user wanted dead, and the body of the post was a retelling of a horrible event that had happened to the user or to a loved one. If the post satisfied "The Story Spinner", the selected individual would die. Periodically after the site had initially been made, Annabelle would reach out to Cox again, asking him to insert random text into the code of the site. Despite this junk text, the website seemed to work as intended. Various people whose names were put into the website disappeared soon afterward, including Carlos Vittery, implying that the events of the first season were planned by Annabelle, given that Prentiss was aggravated to attack the archives only after Martin Blackwood stumbled into her investigating Vittery's statement.
After the Change[]
After the Change Annabelle takes up residence in Upton House with Mikaele Salesa. Upton House is protected from The Change by an artefact in the form of an old camera, which Annabelle eventually steals. She follows John and Martin to London and approaches Martin when he is alone after arguing with John in MAG 194 and leads him to Hill Top Road. At Hill Top Road she shows Martin the gap in reality. When John and Basira arrive she explain's the Web's plan and gives them the option of forcing the other fears through the gap and onto other universes. She also tell them how to destroy the institute using a gas pipe.
Some fans believe it is implied that she was directly responsible for The Change. This is compounded by the reveal that the tapes were never an artefact of The Eye at all, but were rather always of The Web. This would make The Change/The Magnus Archives a Web ritual rather than an Eye ritual. Due to the inherently unknowable nature of The Spider, this is not confirmed.
Her status after the events of MAG 200 is unknown. As of that episode The Spider had accomplished Its stated goals and likely effectively won.
Episode Appearances[]
Annabelle Cane has appeared in the following episodes. Bold marks episodes where she has given a statement.
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