Hidden (Papa IV X Male)

Chapter I - Rumors

"Curiosity killed the cat" is an extremely overused but incomplete saying. "Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back," is the full phrase. The long and short of it is that sometimes a bit of morbid curiosity is worth it in the long run.

Morbid curiosity was a fitting description of what led to my long walk down a path of darkness and fear, or at least that is what I assumed in the beginning. It would become clear, though, that satisfaction had indeed brought the cat back.

I lived in a small New England town where rumors spread like wildfire. Haunted bridges, secret serial killers, all the morbid stories that kids told eachother for a scare weren't necessarily believed in but they were respected. Even if you didn't believe in ghosts, you didn't mess with them. This fact was part of the reason that nobody found the cult that supposedly hid out in a castle in the forest. People searched, of course, kids will do anything on a dare, but would come back with stories of masked figures with cloaks or devilish horned faces. Hell even I had tried to find them as a teenager.

Nowadays, my time was better spent sitting at my desk and feeling like a failure. I wanted to be a writer. I went to college to study literature and thought I was going to come out as a New York Times Bestseller, but the burn out caught up to me and hit hard. I was stuck in my hometown, working as a call center representative and wishing I knew what to do with my life. My 30s were approaching quickly, quickly as in the upcoming Tuesday.

That Saturday morning I had gone out to get some coffee. The cafe was a bit hipset for my taste, but it felt nice to feel fancy once in a while and people watch for a bit. As I sipped on my mocha-java-whatever the fuck, 4 teenaged boys burst through the door. They loudly whispered amongst themselves, throwing out a couple "holy shit!"s and "did you see that?"s. Once they had sat down, the tallest of them pulled out his phone and showed off a photo that they all gawked at. I couldn't gather what it was based on their conversation so I shrugged it off, until the boy dropped his phone and it slid towards me face up, picture still on screen. He scrambled over, picking it up and giving a rushed "Sorry," as he went back to his friends.

From what I could gather, it was a blurry photo of a guy in a mask standing in the woods. A black mask with huge eyes and... horns. A mask with horns in the woods. It reminded me of my days as a teenager, looking for the secret cult in the woods. Maybe it was pure curiosity, maybe it was the craving to break the monotony in my life, but I couldn't help the thought. What if I wrote about them, the cult in the woods? I didn't think they were real of course, it was a stupid story, but what if I just did some research on the origins of the myth and wrote about that? Hell, modern audiences eat up cult stories and conspiracies. I was smack-dab in the middle of a story just waiting to be told.

I didn't stop my research until well past 1 AM, bookmarking and annotating any article or random blog post I could find about this mystery cult. It was hard to pinpoint what exactly was about my town, as there are stories like this everywhere, but I had to try. If it was a dead end it was a dead end but I needed something. That's when I stumbled across it. Tenebrosus Castle.

There was a castle basically in ruins deep in the woods where I had always head the stories as a child. It was a lesser know historical sight that I guess nobody felt the need to preserve, as all photos I could find were just snaps of rock and rubble. It was a hell of a start, though. I marked down the coordinates and prepared myself for a blast from the past.