The mirror maze was left behind, a disturbing mirage in her mental memory. Elara delved deeper into the dark heart of Silas Thorne's psyche, driven by the faint, almost desperate hope of finding some real clue about Lisa. The environment, if anything, had become even more oppressive and claustrophobic. The corridors of flesh narrowed, turning into slimy tunnels that seemed to close in on her. The stench of putrefaction intensified, almost palpable, permeating the virtual air with a nauseating aroma of decay.
She emerged into a new space, and the sight took her breath away, a shudder of horror running through her virtual body. It was a garden. But not a garden of flowers or plants, but a garden of… dolls.
Everywhere, as far as the eye could see in the reddish gloom, stretched a macabre landscape of dolls. Porcelain dolls, rag dolls, wooden dolls, plastic dolls… They came in all sizes, styles, and materials, but all with one thing in common: they were broken, dismembered, desecrated.
Dolls with their limbs torn off, their eyes empty and hollow, their paint peeling, and their faces cracked like masks of pain. Dolls hung from the "trees" of bone and flesh with ropes made of human hair, dolls nailed to the slimy ground with rusty needles, dolls piled in grotesque heaps like the remains of a children's holocaust.
The silence in the doll's garden was even more disturbing than the whispers in the flesh maze. A heavy, expectant silence, broken only by the occasional creak of a doll's limb moving in an invisible breeze, or the faint squeak of one porcelain head colliding with another on a macabre, silent carousel.
Elara inched forward among the rows of mutilated dolls, her stomach churning, her sense of anguish and nausea growing. Every blank face, every broken limb, every hollow stare seemed to accuse her, to reproach her for her intrusion into this unholy sanctuary of Silas's mind.
In the center of the garden, she discovered a structure larger and more elaborate than the others. A sort of grotesque gazebo built of bleached bones and adorned with doll heads like macabre trophies. Inside the gazebo, seated on a throne made of assembled doll limbs, she saw a figure.
It was Silas again, the same deformed manifestation she had encountered in the butterfly garden. But now, he was dressed in ragged, dirty clothes, and he was holding in his lap a particularly large and elaborate porcelain doll, its face untouched and with a strangely melancholy look in its glass eyes. He stroked the doll with an unnatural gentleness, as if it were a sick baby or a dying pet.
"Look at my garden, intruder," Silas said, without looking up from his doll. His voice, this time, was softer, almost plaintive. "It's beautiful, isn't it? All my girls… are here with me. Forever."
Elara stood at a distance, observing the scene with a mixture of repulsion and morbid fascination. This place… was an even deeper reflection of Silas's disturbed mind, a window into his psychopathy, his obsession with corrupted childhood, with broken and perverted fragility.
"Where's Lisa?" Elara asked, trying to keep her voice steady despite the discomfort her surroundings caused her. "¿Do you have her here, in your garden?"
Silas slowly raised his head, and for the first time, his dark eyes fixed directly on Elara. A blank stare, devoid of apparent emotion, but one that sent an icy chill through her. The eerie smile on his distorted face was gone, replaced by an expression of melancholic sadness.
"Lisa…" Silas repeated, as if tasting the name in his mouth. "She… isn't ready for kindergarten yet. She's not broken yet. But soon… soon she will be. And then… she can join my other girls. Forever."
Elara felt her blood run cold. The veiled confession, the implicit threat… She was closer to Lisa than she'd imagined, but also closer to absolute horror. She had to act quickly, before Silas "broke" Lisa and added her to his macabre collection of broken dolls in this hellish garden.
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