I’m in a large room with a low ceiling. With the green light, it’s hard to make out what’s around me, but I’m surrounded by rectangular shapes that seem to be boxes. I step forward. My foot crunches down on a tangle of hard, lumpy sticks.

Leaning down, I investigate the small pile. I realize there are mounds of sticks around me, and that the whole room is full of them. Sticks on the walls, hanging from the ceiling like wind chimes, sticks on the floor forming little camps of clutter.

But that doesn’t make sense. Why go to the trouble to construct these little tangles? Maybe, I think, dread slowly coursing through me, because they aren’t sticks at all. I take another look at the pile by my foot and find a tiny skull.

“Oh, god.”

Bones. They’re bones.

I spin around, on high alert. There’s a bucket of slop in the corner, a soiled mattress. Is this where he sleeps? Herman? Am I in some sort of secret room? Melted candles and faded photographs of the girls are propped in one corner.

Walking a few tentative steps forward, I notice there’s another display tucked in the back of the room. I tell myself not to go ahead, but something pulls me closer. An instinct beyond the corridors of my mind, like an otherworldly whisper I can’t ignore.

Look, the whisper calls. Over here. Look at what he’s done.

I try to make out the lumps in the viewfinder. At first I think it’s those girls again, but then I realize that whatever is here isn’t moving and is just clothed in little girls’ dresses. The green viewfinder light paints everything in a ghostly glow. I have to stand a few feet away to see that the dresses are adorned on crudely constructed girl-sized dolls. Tied and glued together animal and human bones form their delicate limbs, and each bone doll’s tiny jaw is missing.

Bastard, I think. Anger fills me like a poison. Herman knew no one could hear those little girls scream. He knew no one could save them, because no one knew they were here. He stole them away in the night. He silenced them.

I lean over, my hands on my knees. From somewhere deep in the tunnels, Jackson cries out. I startle, taking in a deep intake of breath. Backing up slowly, I wave the night vision camera, searching for the arched doorway. I’ve never heard Jackson cry out like that. His voice echoes through the corridors. It cuts right through me. What is that monster doing to my brother?