At the end, Harry enters a dark area inhabited by three others: Dahlia; a person wrapped from head to toe in bandages and seated in a wheelchair; and the girl Alessa, seated on the floor. When Harry demands to know where Cheryl is, Dahlia replies that Cheryl is sitting “Right in front of him”, that she has been there all along. The girl seated on the floor has been seen throughout the entire game. She is Cheryl. Harry has been running into Cheryl through the entire game. So why didn't she ever talk to him, let him know who she really was?
Because Cheryl never really existed, in fact, neither did Alessa. Both of the girls are only conjurations of Dahlia's cult. See, the cult wanted to bring their lord Samael to the mortal world, so that he could take control of the universe. But for the cult to benefit they would have to be able to control Samael. The only way to do this was to summon Samael into an unborn fetus, a child that the cult could raise and teach to control its powers, all for the benefit of the cult, of course. Dahlia conceived the child somehow, with the help of Dr. Kaufman. (He either inseminated her, or had intercourse with her. But when the child was born, only half of Samael's Dark Soul had been summoned into the child. To prove this, I will refer to two ghostly flashbacks of sorts that Harry is witness to on his way to the final confrontation with Dahlia and the two Alessas.
The scene prior is the one that I believe occurred first. Alessa and Dahlia are struggling in an upstairs area of Dahlia's house, seen previously only from an exterior shot in the intro sequence. (Yes, the house where Cheryl seems to be trapped.) Alessa refuses to do what Dahlia says. Dahlia wants Alessa to use her latent powers for her evil interests. Alessa is not cooperating with the cult's interests. She only wants to be a normal kid, with a normal mother. Somehow, this reveals to Dahlia that in order to summon the other half of Samael, she must have another child. This is how there are two children.
What happened to the first Alessa? Think back to the scene Harry witnesses in the Hospital basement. The cult members are all standing around the horribly burned child. One of the members has some kind of perception that tells him that only half of the Dark Soul is contained in the child. The cult has failed, temporarily. Burning the child has placed it into a coma, where the power within can be tapped by the cult, but only in a minimal basis. This is when Dahlia begins to reveal that she knows how to summon the second part of the Dark Soul. But the scene cuts away. They burned Alessa on purpose! The fire that Lisa refers to in one of her scenes, which she says consumed half of Silent Hill and put an end to the cult activities in town, occurred seven years ago. Cheryl is seven years old. Alessa looks like she's a teenager, about fourteen maybe. In the second flashback, she looks like she's about seven.
So let's add it all up, starting from the beginning. Fourteen years before the events of the game, in neither Silent Hill that exists in the game, but the REAL one, Dahlia and the cult performed a ritual to summon their dark God Samael into material form. This way, they could control him, and together they would all rule the cosmos. Nice plan. Then they performed a ceremony similar to the one you can read about in Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby. (Hence, the street named Levin St.) But the ceremony only conjured a child that contained half the soul of their dark god, and so it only remained dormant within the child. That child was Alessa. For seven years, the cult and Dahlia tried fruitlessly to teach the stubborn child to tap into the power she carried, and to come to terms with her true purpose for living. The girl continued to refuse. So the cult locked her in her bedroom, and set fire to Dahlia's house. This is the fire that spread, and nearly burned up half the town, which Lisa refers to. Everyone in town knew that Dahlia had a little girl, but the story was that she died in the fire. The cult knew that the power within the girl's body would prevent her from dying. The cult members thought that by doing this, they would be able to use the power within Alessa without having to coax her into compliance. This is when the scene in the hidden rooms in the hospital basement occurs. The cult realizes something that Dahlia has known for some time, that Alessa only contains half of the Dark Soul of Samael. The power can be used now that Alessa can't get in the way, but it is very weak because it is only half there. This is when Dahlia begins to reveal her idea to the cult, the one she'd had previously, about conceiving a second child. So the ritual was performed again, and the second child was born. It contained the second half of the Dark Soul, and this is Cheryl, essentially. So you've got two identical creatures, containing two halves of a Dark Soul. Since both girls share the same dormant soul, both girls are the same girl, in essence.
This is why Cheryl disappears. When she and Harry crash, notice how the jeep seems to go right through Alessa? Think of it in metaphor. This symbolizes Cheryl crashing into herself, her REAL self. Also, think of the fact that there are two Alessas at the end of the game as being a metaphor for there being two halves of the Dark Soul. So there was, metaphysically, only one girl, conjured one half at a time. Two half-girls, two half-Dark Souls. One demon god. Samael. It's a metaphysical equation written across the entire game. It has taken me almost a full year, but I have cracked it.
Why does Cheryl, who now appears as Alessa throughout the game, conjure such horrible monsters to try to kill the man who raised her and loved her for seven years? This will be answered in the Topic 3: Harry; Dahlia's Pawn.
The only other question I have left to answer is how did Dahlia lose the second child? How did Harry and his wife find her on the roadside during one of their vacations in Silent Hill?
The answer I will give involves the videotape item found in the Alternate Hospital and the scene of Lisa and Kaufman fighting, which occurs in the intro movie, but never in the game. When finally viewed without static, the videotape reveals that Lisa was the nurse forced by Dr. Kaufman to care for Alessa after the fire. The horror of the situation was too much for Lisa to bear. But she was forced to go on, since her Diary indicates that she was addicted to White Claudia, a drug manufactured by the cult to bring the citizens and tourists of Silent Hill under their power, to make them do what they wished. Lisa's videotape appears to be shot in Alessa's very room, where she was confined for many long years in burning torment. She knew that Kaufman and his creepy cult friends were somehow involved. Now the theory that I can easily form from all this information, and the only one that makes sense, is that somehow, Lisa realized that her patient was Dahlia's daughter, burned alive. When Dahlia produced a second child, Lisa would have surely assumed that the second child was also in danger. Being the truly caring person that we see throughout the game, she finally stands up to Kaufman (as seen in the cinema) and takes the child. Perhaps she only got as far as the highway, before she fell victim to her drug addiction, and turned back. Rather than take the child back, perhaps she figured it was a lesser fate to be abandoned on the side of the road than to be left in the clutches of the evil cult. I'll bet anything that Lisa is one of the townspeople who died under strange circumstances, as mentioned in the article clipping Harry finds as well as by Lisa herself. So why doesn't she remember any of this when she talks to Harry? Because the Lisa that Harry meets is only her ghostly memory, created by what Alessa remembers of her. And Alessa, being trapped in her hospital room deep under the Hospital, wouldn't know about Lisa's abduction of the second child, or of Harry's finding and raising the girl, or of Lisa's fate. For more explanation on why Lisa isn't the REAL Lisa, refer to Topic 5: Lisa.
Back To Main Explanations Page Topic 2: Silent Hill