Marcus Bell sped through the deserted streets of the industrial district, his sirens silent and his emergency lights flashing in the dark night. Sarah Jenkins's confession, the mention of the "glass house," the palpable urgency in her broken, terrified voice—everything screamed to him that Lisa Kramer could be in imminent danger, trapped somewhere connected to Silas Thorne's unhealthy obsession.
The "glass house." What did that expression mean? Was it a metaphor, a mental construct in Silas's mind, like Elara's dream visions? Or did it have a physical counterpart, a real place in the outside world where Silas could have hidden Lisa? Marcus didn't know for sure, but he couldn't afford to ignore the clue, however vague and disturbing it was.
He remembered the red workshop, warehouse #37, the place where Sarah painted the desecrated dolls, where photographs of mutilated girls adorned the walls. That place was the physical embodiment of Silas's disturbed mind, his laboratory of perversion in the real world. And perhaps the "glass house" also had its physical reflection somewhere nearby, in some dark and forgotten corner of this industrial labyrinth.
He called dispatch on speakerphone , requesting backup and a thorough search of the industrial area, focusing on abandoned warehouses, ruined factories, anything that might fit the vague description of a "glass house." He didn't know what he was looking for exactly, but he had a hunch, a gut feeling that told him Lisa was nearby, somewhere in that shadowy, labyrinthine area, and that time was running out.
He arrived at Warehouse 37, abruptly parking the patrol car in front of the rusty metal gate. He jumped out, drawing his weapon again, and ran into the red garage, flashlight shining into the darkness. The place was deserted, silent, still permeated with the acrid smell of wax and paint. Sarah Jenkins was no longer there. She had been taken to the hospital for psychiatric evaluation, but her words echoed loudly in Marcus's mind, guiding him in his desperate search.
He walked through the red workshop again, examining every corner, every detail, looking for something he had missed on his first inspection, something that might connect the macabre workshop to the mysterious "glass house." The workbench with the remains of red wax, the doll molds, the containers of pigment, the photographs of desecrated girls… Everything was there, confirming Silas's unhealthy obsession, but offering no direct clues about the "glass house."
Suddenly, his gaze fell on a detail he had previously overlooked. In a corner of the workshop, behind a pile of empty cardboard boxes, he saw a mirror. Not a handheld mirror like the one he had found in Stargher's room, but a large, rectangular wall mirror with an ornate silver frame. It leaned against the wall, partially covered by a dusty tarp.
Marcus approached the mirror and removed the cloth, revealing its reflective surface. It was an elegant, antique mirror, but broken. A deep, branching crack ran from top to bottom of the glass, shattering the reflection into multiple distorted and distorted images.
A broken mirror. A mirror… crystallized in its own fracture.
And then, he understood. The "glass house" wasn't a physical place, it wasn't a real building. It was a metaphor, a symbolic construction in Silas's mind, a dreamlike representation of his obsession with perfection and fragility. But the broken mirror… the broken mirror was real.
It was there, in the red workshop, tangible and present, a point of connection between Silas's mental world and physical reality. And perhaps the answer to where Lisa was, the key to finding the "glass house" in the real world, lay in that broken mirror, in its fragmented and distorted reflection of the truth.
As Marcus stared at the broken mirror in the dimness of the red workshop, his cell phone began to ring, breaking the expectant silence with a shrill, urgent sound. It was the switchboard.
They had news. They had found something. Something that could be Silas Thorne's "glass house," somewhere lost in the industrial labyrinth. The knocking in the broken warehouse heralded the beginning of the end, the final confrontation in the desperate search for Lisa Kramer.
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