Act Three - The Angel’s Game — Chapter 12

David arrives at Andreas Corelli’s hilltop house beneath a red-tinged sky, stalked by unseen dogs and oppressive silence. Inside, dust and decay suggest long abandonment. In the dark sitting room, he confronts a motionless figure he believes to be Corelli and fires twice. The body neither bleeds nor moves; light reveals it is a painted wooden dummy spilling fine, glittering dust.

Rattled and enraged, David smashes the puppet and tears down the angel painting to reveal the basement door he remembered. With a candle and revolver, he descends into a surgical chamber preserved in dust—an operating table, lamps, and trays of instruments—flanked by multiple mannequins. Among them he recognizes replicas of the butler and the chauffeur from his first visit, and then finds a half-finished dummy of himself, which chills him.

A childlike laugh from above jolts David back upstairs. The fallen “boss” dummy is gone, replaced by footprints leading toward the exit before abruptly stopping. Scanning the gallery of old photographs, he notices a new addition where a gap had been: Cristina, in white, supported by two arms. The smiling figure beside her is Corelli.

Confronted by this taunting proof of Corelli’s reach and a grotesque workshop of doubles, David grasps that he is being manipulated, that identities can be fabricated, and that Cristina has been drawn even more intimately into Corelli’s designs.