A mysterious young man bearing strange scarifications, found wandering near the gates of Paris, is hospitalized at the Saint-Maurice Hospitals and disappears under unusual circumstances. A notebook in which he recorded his writings reveals his strange story, which begins with his initiation into a Masonic lodge. He recounts his troubled family history to a brother and shares his suspicions surrounding the long-lost disappearance of his father, whom he never knew. He imagines that his grandmother, a tyrannical and treacherous woman, is behind this unsolved disappearance. He resolves to investigate in his hometown, a place he has never returned to and whose name he refuses to even mention, so painful are the memories it evokes and so irrational anxieties it stirs within him. His investigation will lead him to unexpected discoveries bordering on the fantastic and the insane. What is this dark force he has unwittingly unleashed?