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The hallway feels too narrow, the air pressed thin. I can smell the rot now. Damp wood. Rust. Beneath it, something sour, something faintly metallic. Blood has a smell. I know it well enough to recognize it.

Every instinct in me is screaming. Turn around. Go back. Leave.

But I keep moving.

Clyde stops at a door at the end of the hall, one hand resting on the tarnished brass handle. His shoulders are stiff beneath his jacket, his posture unreadable.

“This is it,” he says, turning his head just enough to glance at me over his shoulder. His face is pale in the flashlight’s wash, his features blank.

I swallow hard. “What’s inside?”

He pauses. Then he twists the knob, slow, deliberate. The hinges groan as the door eases open, the sound long and aching.

“I guess we’re about to find out,” he says quietly.

The room beyond is pure shadow at first, my flashlight’s weak glow swallowed whole. Then the smell hits me. Sweat. Mildew. Something metallic that slices through it all like a knife.

I lift the beam higher.

And then I see them.

Photographs.

Rows upon rows, stretching across every wall, framed beneath flickering light like a shrine. Dozens. No, hundreds.

Not victims.

Men.

“What the hell?”

Their faces stare out from black-and-white prints and faded Polaroids and crisp, glossy portraits, spanning decades. The older photos are sepia toned, their edges curled with age; the newer ones gleam beneath fresh tape, untouched by time.

Each face carries the same expression: authority. Confidence. Power. Some smiling, some solemn, some posed behind pulpits, others standing beneath crosses, or clasping hands with other men in dark suits. Pastors. Deacons. Businessmen. Leaders.

Men I recognize. Men I’ve passed on the street, sat near at community meetings. Men I thought were gone.

And men I don’t recognize, faces from before my time.

Generations of them.

A wall of legacy. A wall of predators.

A brotherhood stretching farther back than I’d ever imagined.

My throat tightens. My chest constricts.

It isn’t a gallery of victims.

It’s a record. A lineage. A throne room built from faces of those who held the power, and passed it down.

My gaze catches on a familiar smile, half-shadowed in the corner, a man who once handed out candy at Sunday school, his hand lingering too long when he pressed the peppermint into my palm. Another face stares down near the center: Councilman Reid, the man who’d prayed over Cindy’s coffin, his lips trembling with holy grief.

And beneath him, my breath stutters, my father. Younger. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Clyde’s father, both their smiles tight, their arms clasped like brothers-in-arms beneath the banner of the church.

My pulse pounds loud in my ears, throat tight. “What the hell is this?” I whisper, stepping closer despite myself, despite the bile rising in my throat.

Clyde doesn’t speak right away. He steps beside me slowly, his eyes scanning the wall with a strange kind of wonder. The flashlight beam trembles slightly in his grip, catching glimmers off the varnished surfaces, faces staring back at us through the years.