gloom
assumption: walter's death
"The Second Sign
And God said,
Offer the Blood of the Ten Sinners and the White Oil.
Be then release from the bonds of the flesh, and gain the Power of Heaven."
When we enter the sealed room at Room 302, we find Walter's dead body, with the numbers 11/21 carved on him. We still can find evidences that the Holly Assumption ritual was done there - the White Oil, the Cult's unholy Bible, a black cup on the fridge and rests of blood of the ten first victims. However, this is the biggest , yet unsolved, enigma in SH4 plot: how and when the ritual took place exactly and why Walter's body is here, considering Walter killed himself in a prison cell, after being arrested for the first ten crimes he had committed?
There are several theories about it, some of them really interesting - one of them even considering that there are actually two Walters, I mean like twin borhters... However, in my opinion, this is what happened: after killing the tenth victim, Walter got caught by police, or even allowed himself to be caught; and once in prison, he committed suicide (read the SH2 connections page for more details about this) to free himself from his mortal flesh ("Be then release from the bonds of the flesh, and gain the Power of Heaven"). That way Walter's life didn't actually end, but a new life began for him - in a more powerful, even invulnerable (as we can see during the game) form, as the chosen one he is.
As we get to know during the game, Walter was buried in a cemetery near to Silent Hill (the cemetery you visit in the Forest world, near to the Toluca lake) - but some time later, somebody got the body from its grave, now empty. This "somebody" had to be the reborn Walter retrieving his own mortal body, and later hiding it in the sealed secret room on Room 302, performing also the Assumption ritual, offering his own dead body as the eleventh sacrifice. He did it there not just because it was a secret and safe place, but also, I think, because it was the way to return himself to where he really belonged, to his mother's entrails.
When Walter got arrested some years ago, he said something that makes us think that he wasn't acting consciously when he killed the first ten victims - like if he had been possessed by some kind of evil forces, or something (again, read this page for more details). When I first read that, I thought Walter was simply another victim of the cult, that they had been using him as a puppet for any of their evil plans - that he could have suffered any kind of hallucinations, maybe because of drugs (we don't have to forget about the close relationship the Samael cult had with drugs traffic) that made him act violently and kill all that people, but that he was actually innocent. And actually I was quite close to the truth: as I've said before in this page, I read what I needed to know after finishing the game, in the extra information that the SH4 Victims files, in the official website, provided: Walter had been possessed by Valtiel, Samael's attendant, and he had been acting under his influence all that time.
We'll never know if the moment Walter regained his consciusness while being arrested was only that, a moment, or if when he killed himself he was still out of Valtiel's control as well. I mean, maybe the mortal Walter died because he choose to do so as the only way to redeem himself from the horrible crimes he had committed, as the only way he had to escape what he had done; or maybe the real, inner Walter manifested just a moment, and once he was locked up in prison Valtiel retrieved the control he had over him, and Walter simply killed himself because he had to do it to go on with the ritual. In the end, why he did it doesn't really matter, because the consequences are the same: the new, immortal, Walter, the one who had the needed power to complete the ritual and resurrect the holy mother, had been born.
After his death and posterior rebirth and before the game time, Walter killed four more people whose murder temes would be themed as Void, Darkness, Gloom and Despair - being the last of these four the last prson who lived in Room 302 before Henry: Joseph Schreiber.
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