This is just a slice of inspiration that came to me one day. I've always wanted to write a "villains perspective".

The basic idea started off almost parody like, with our villain reflecting on the tropes we know and love but as I developed my ideas for the plot, it didn't take long for my trademark 'dark' Scooby to shine through again!

There are just five parts to this story. Which is in complete contrast to my multi chapter epics but it's been nice to do something so different from my usual style.

The entire story is told from the POV of our mysterious man in the mask which has been a huge challenge but a lot of fun! I'm very curious what people think so do let me know!

Part One - Meet Aiden.

"What's the worst that could happen?"

Ever since David had uttered that immortal phrase. I knew that our plan was, one way or another, essentially doomed.

Everyone knew it was a phrase that was tempting fate at best, and yet David had grinned and said it without a second thought. He obviously wasn't concerned about the idea of tempting fate. If I said anything, I know he would have just laughed and said that I was too superstitious for my own good. And David would have been right, I am incredibly superstitious. Always have been. Back when I had friends, much to their hilarity, I would make a point of walking around ladders, cringe at the sight of a black cat, make excuses not to be out on Friday the 13th. I very much believed in bad luck and omens, so when David uttered that immortal phrase, I had grinned back at him inanely but with my heart sinking inside. Now you've done it David! I had thought in despair.

I hadn't been half as convincing as I thought because he caught my eye, and rolled his own skywards in disgust. "Jesus, Aiden! You're not thinking of this superstitious crap again are you? Everything is going to be fine!"

Spoiler alert people, it was not fine. It was a long way from being fine. This is perhaps best illustrated by the fact I'm writing this from the comfortable confines of my prison cell, but that doesn't even begin to tell you half of this story. Turns out the answer to "what's the worst that could happen?" is pretty much... fucking everything...

To give you some context to my fine character before I tell you my story, let me just assure you I wasn't always such a reprobate. For the first twenty or so years of my life, although I wasn't exactly a model citizen, I kept myself out of trouble. At school I worked fairly hard, just enough to graduate but to play even harder. It was at college where things really spiralled badly. I fell in with the cliché 'wrong crowd', and my studies took an inevitable hit. I took drugs, I slept around. I became the stereotypical bad boy and I loved it. I loved the attention, I loved the girls hanging off my arm, competing to share my bed. The nights slowly got wilder and wilder and my lust for more grew stronger. I dropped out of college. Was disowned by my parents and eventually, my one true girl. Jenny was the one good thing in my life, and she gave me far more chances than I deserved but she finally kicked me to the kerb. Told me to get myself straight. Sadly I went further in the other direction.

For the last three years I have become, to my shame, something of a career criminal. And though I'm not proud of it, I was getting by OK by myself. Until I had the misfortune to come across this town called Coolsville, where I met the man who changed the trajectory of my life. David Warner.

David Warner was intoxicating to me from the start. He was much older and I was still young and impressionable. It didn't take much for him to take me under his wing. Looking back now, I realised it was I who fell into his hands perfectly, but at the time, his crazy proposal seemed exciting. I was hitting up liquor stores to get what I needed. David Warner was a far more sophisticated criminal and had far bigger fish to fry. I can still remember the night he first told me about the gold and the manor. It seemed too good to be true, but he was quick to lay the foundations, to convince me. For a little bit of work, a huge reward lay in wait and I was soon bowled over by the temptation he dangled in front of me. I was a fool. I should have known. But even then, I could never have predicted the events of that night. That night that will stay with me forever. This is my story.

"So, what do you think?" David asked.

I spun around from the book I was reading, and tried desperately not to laugh.

Oh my god. He was actually serious.

In the month or so that I had known David, I thought of him as relentlessly cool, an air of the untouchable, so when he first proposed these...costumes, I firmly thought he was joking.

He was not.

He was dressed in a colonial costume. I had to say if his intention was to replicate the men he had shown me in the pictures, then he had completely succeeded. It was just beyond me why it was necessary in the first place.

"Run it by me again?" I asked. "This manor is pretty much in the middle of nowhere."

"Correct."

"And you are absolutely sure that no one still lives there, or even takes care of the property any more."

"That's right."

"So why do we need to dress up as ghosts again?"

I cringed to myself as I said those words. When David had first mooted the suggestion of 'ghosts', I immediately had a vision of a classic sheet over the head with eye holes cut out. Oh no - David's plan was far more elaborate than that.

That wouldn't convince anyone, David had laughed and said to leave it with him.

So when we arrived at this grand manor this afternoon, the first thing he had done was present me with 'our costumes'.

"And this," he had said proudly, "is the piece de resistance" and he thrust a rubber mask onto his face before handing one to me.

I had to admit, if we were going into a fancy dress contest, I'm quite sure we would have won first prize. We looked exactly like the long dead owners of the property.

"I do have to hand it to you, David, they're pretty convincing."

Jeremiah and Walter Stevenson had supposedly robbed a bank and then each hidden the spoils of their haul somewhere in their vast manor. Both brothers died keeping the secret of the location and according to David, the legend goes that the gold itself was cursed. The brothers both died mysteriously within a couple of months of each other, followed by their housekeeper, and two subsequent owners of the property, including one who supposedly was driven mad and hung himself in the attic. It quickly became blacklisted and had stood empty and overgrown for a decade now.

Locals also insisted the land the property was on had a gypsy curse. Either way it became a no go zone. David had recruited me to help search for the gold but had also insisted on the costumes of Jeremiah and Walter Stevenson.

Of course, as soon he mentioned talk of the gold being cursed, he had some convincing to do to get to me to agree. He assured me it was all a load of bunkum dreamt up by locals to dissuade anyone trying to find it. I found my desire to find the gold completely overshadowed the concern I had about the so called curse.

After David had given me a tour of the vast property earlier, I had realised two pertinent things.

The manor was creepy as fuck. It had a myriad of secret passages and trap doors and trip levers for no sane reason and I couldn't wait for when this nonsense was all over.

The second thing I noted was David's dedication to the 'scare story' as he called it. He had spent goodness knows how long perfecting his scary costume, lovingly sprinkling the clothes in phosphorous paint but seemingly that wasn't enough. He insisted any nosey local might decide to investigate so needed to be firmly scared away. David had then spent hours rigging up speakers and microphones to pump 'scare noises' in at a moment's notice.

It all felt ridiculously unnecessary to me, but I was happy to go along with it for David. David had come along at a very rough point in my life and had shown me some kindness, not to mention the possibility of something quite incredible.

Although I disagreed strongly with the haunting aspect, I couldn't deny how excited I was by the prospect of potentially finding this gold.

We then both spent the rest of the afternoon in the manor's cavernous library doing 'research' as it was surely folly to just randomly begin to search the huge manor. It would take at least a whole week with all the secret rooms.

I quickly became frustrated reading journal after journal of the brothers, barely able to decipher the squirrelly handwriting but David seemed to have better luck.

He stood up suddenly, causing me to jump a little, and laughed to himself loudly.

"Of course," he said, "Of course!" and I waited for him to share.

"It makes more sense that they buried the gold outside," he said, eyes shining. "I think the gold could be in the barn."

"Barn?" I said, raising my eyebrows in amusement. "That dilapidated structure outside was actually a barn?"

He grinned at me as we both hurried outside to what remained of the barn. We had parked the car behind the barn earlier so that no one would see it and had then decamped into the grand manor. Turns out we were in the right place all along. The barn was 'secured' by a chain looped around the doors and David pulled that off with ease. We opened the doors together, choking from the dust that flew off. The barn was empty now but still carried an overpowering odour of must and decay. David went to the car and returned with a lantern and a couple of shovels.

"Wouldn't metal detectors have been helpful too?" I suggested, but he shook his head.

"From what I read, the gold is buried far too deep. We best get started, the sun is starting to set."

For the next few hours, (under David's instruction as to where) we began the back breaking work of digging, all the while wearing the costumes of the Stevenson brothers. The sweat was real.

As I worked with him in the rickety, ramshackle barn, sweating to death inside the heavy period clothing, I once again found myself with the erstwhile question that had been rattling around since he dreamt up 'the plan'.

Why in the blue hell was any of this remotely necessary?!

I still didn't understand why, in the miniscule event that someone might see some dim lights in the old manor were on, and then have the chutzpah to actually come and 'investigate', why good old-fashioned ski masks and a threat of violence wouldn't be enough.

Not that I was ever an advocate of violence. I said a threat of violence. Big difference. But David insisted the ghost thing would be far more effective given the chat about curses that had the town on strings supposedly.

Ah, this town, Coolsville. It wasn't a town that had ever appeared on my radar before but after my latest stint of sofa surfing ended, it was the town I somehow stumbled into. Not long after, I met David and that was that.

I had to trust him and just suck it up. We seemed to be making real good progress digging down pretty deep, shame we hadn't found anything remotely interesting yet.

At around 10.00 pm, I felt ready to combust and begged David for a break. He told me to go on right ahead so I retreated inside and back towards the huge kitchen. As soon as I was in, I pulled the mask from my face, feeling huge beads of sweat trickling down my face. In the fridge, I grabbed one of the bottle of waters we had put there earlier, and took a grateful long swig. All of the digging was thirsty work and I relished the feel of the cool liquid sliding down my throat.

I replaced the cap and placed it into the fridge and that's when I first heard it. It was the opposite side of the property to the barn where David was, so I rushed to the front of the house, using the flash light on my phone to light the way. I peered out through the dirty window. My keen sense of hearing hadn't deserted me and I had the presence of mind to quickly extinguish the light.

I stood there in the dark, breathing heavily, waiting to see if the sound would continue and confirm it was what I feared it was.

Just a few seconds later, and my worst fears were being realised. All of David's bluster that the costumes were just a precaution was crumbling before my very eyes. I wasn't wrong. The sound I had thought I heard was a vehicle approaching, no doubt about it. The tyres crunched slowly on the gravel as it drove down the path, it was too far away to see what kind of vehicle it was yet. Unless it was a cop car, (And I would have expected to see that before I heard it) I didn't care. All that mattered was that against all the odds, someone was here. I had no idea why. Why on earth would anyone be out here at this time of night unless it was to investigate what we were doing?

Maybe we weren't being as careful as we thought?

As the vehicle rolled closer, the head lights illuminating the path, I could see exactly what it was now. My eyes widened. It was certainly quite something.

I had positively never seen something so offensively garish in my whole life. As the van came to a stop, my heart was racing wildly. Just who the hell thought it was a good idea to turn up to a supposedly abandoned manor at night, and more importantly, who on earth names their van at all, let alone something as hokey sounding as...wait for it... 'The Mystery Machine'?