I surveyed the rubble scattered across the floor. Saw bits of wood from broken crosses. A ceramic eye, a whiskered jaw, thorns embedded in brown hair. Jesus shattered into a thousand pieces. This house of blasphemy.

“Who are you people?” I said, my voice reverberating in the quiet room, and received no answer. Cassie was hugging herself. I felt watched.

The steps leading to the pulpit were broken with jagged edges. “Follow me,” Malia said, and we watched as she carefully placed her feet on the few footholds that wouldn’t cave. We followed her up onto the open landing. There was a stain on the floor where an organ once stood. A square patch where the podium used to be. Malia bent over as she walked and examined the boards, stopping by one on the left-hand side and lifting it up.

“Hold this, please,” she said, and I did. She bent down and wiped dirt and sawdust off a crooked nail and pulled it. I heard a faint click. We moved to the backside of the pulpit and repeated the exercise. Then again on the right-hand side. This time when she pulled the bent nail a wooden board popped up ever so slightly in the center of the floor. Underneath this board was a small hidden panel that slid open to reveal a series of buttons that blended into the appearance of packed dirt. It was a keypad. Malia entered the code and we heard the pop of locks disengaging as the outline of a hatch door emerged along the seams of the floorboards.

“It’s heavy,” Malia said, by which she meant, ‘You lift it.’

I did, and it weighed every bit of fifty pounds. I had a flash vision of dropping the heavy lid on Malia’s head when she moved underneath it, but resisted. She’s a victim in this, too.

There was a steep stairway leading down. A faint light coming from the bottom. Malia went first, Cassie second, me last. I lowered the lid down after us, igniting the pain in my strained back. Heard the locks reengage when I let it go, and thought, Here we are, served up on a silver platter.

The stairway led to a long concrete corridor. Caged bulbs were spaced out along the wall, providing a sterile light. We followed Malia down a ways, could hear her Victorian dress sashaying in the tomb-like silence. Passed a couple of unmarked doors made from what looked like reinforced steel. Under other circumstances this would be the realization of a childhood dream. Hidden bunkers, elaborate conspiracies, top-secret experiments. I didn’t feel elated, though. I felt dread. Every step led me closer toward the realization that this was something we’d never recover from. There was no way to return to a life of normalcy after this. No matter what, we would be forever altered, and it was all my fault.