The threat implicit in Silas's words—about "breaking" Lisa and adding her to his doll garden—resonated loudly in Elara's mind, even in this unreal mental space. She had to act, and fast. But the doll garden, with its macabre beauty and oppressive silence, seemed to envelop her, paralyzing her with its sickly atmosphere.
She forced herself to move, to leave the grotesque gazebo of bone and dolls behind and go deeper into the garden. Between the rows of mutilated dolls, she discovered a barely visible path, winding between the macabre figures and disappearing into the reddish gloom. She followed the path, feeling as if she were being led to a new level of horror, to an even more intimate and disturbing place in Silas's mind.
The path led her to a clearing, and before her rose a structure singularly unlike anything she had seen so far in this mental world. A house. Not an organic, twisted house like the flesh corridors, nor a grotesque one like the bone gazebo, but a house of glass.
A fragile, transparent structure, made entirely of thin, delicate glass panels, held together by an invisible frame. The interior of the house was perfectly visible from the outside, revealing elegant, antique furnishings, albeit covered in dust and cobwebs. A life-size dollhouse, Elara thought with a shudder.
She cautiously approached the glass house and peered through the transparent panels. Inside, she saw a scene that left her breathless and with a lump in her throat.
A little girl, about seven or eight years old, sat in a velvet chair in the center of the glass house's parlor. It was Lisa Kramer. He knew it instantly, despite the extreme pallor of her face and the lost, absent look in her eyes. Lisa was there, trapped in Silas's mind, visible yet unreachable, like a wax figure in a museum of horrors.
Lisa was wearing a simple white nightgown and holding in her lap a porcelain doll identical to the one Silas had been fondling in the gazebo. But this doll wasn't broken or desecrated. It was pristine, new, with a lace dress and bright, expressive glass eyes. A perfect doll, in contrast to the surrounding landscape of broken and mutilated dolls that surrounded the glass house.
Elara tried to open the house's glass door, but it was locked, sealed tight. She tried pushing the glass panels, but they were solid and impenetrable. She was trapped outside, looking through the glass at Lisa, unable to reach her, unable to communicate that she was there to rescue her.
Inside the glass house, Lisa remained motionless, as if in a trance, staring at the doll in her lap, showing no reaction to Elara's presence on the other side of the glass. She seemed to be in her own world, isolated and distant, disconnected from the reality around her. Was she even aware that she was trapped in the mind of a killer?
Suddenly, Silas's deformed figure appeared behind her, emerging from the rows of broken dolls like a menacing shadow. Elara spun around, facing him, her heart pounding.
"¿Do you like my glass house, intruder?" Silas said, his voice a raspy, mocking whisper. "It's where I keep my most precious treasures. The… fragile, perfect things." He walked up to the glass house and placed a misshapen hand on a transparent panel, right next to Lisa's expressionless face.
Elara watched in horror as Silas stared at Lisa through the glass, a look of sick possession in his empty eyes. The glass house… was a transparent prison, a showcase where Silas displayed his perfect, untouched victims before "breaking" them and adding them to his collection of mutilated dolls. And Lisa was trapped inside, about to become just another piece in his macabre collection.
Time was running out. Elara had to find a way into the glass house, to reach Lisa and awaken her from her mental slumber before it was too late. But how to break a prison made of glass in a world made of mind?
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