In this chap­ter titled The Cross-Roads, the sto­ry opens with a silent frac­ture, one that grows steadi­ly between Char­lot­ta and her hus­band, Herr Alt­gelt. His devo­tion to music becomes an escape from the qui­et tur­moil with­in their home, each note pulled from his vio­lin carv­ing out more space between them. Char­lot­ta, once con­tent in his pres­ence, now feels invisible—her feel­ings reduced to back­ground noise as he retreats into the struc­ture of his com­po­si­tions. Her lock­et, once cher­ished, now tight­ens in her hand like a clenched thought, anchor­ing her to a con­nec­tion she can no longer feel. Frus­tra­tion brews beneath her restraint until, in a sud­den moment of des­per­a­tion, she smash­es the violin—an act of betray­al that mir­rors how neglect­ed she has come to feel. The sharp crack of splin­tered wood is more than anger; it is the cry of a woman erased with­in her own home, seek­ing to be seen through destruc­tion when affec­tion fails.

That frac­ture becomes final in the chap­ter’s next breath, where sui­cide arrives not with noise, but with silence and per­ma­nence. The nar­ra­tive does not sen­sa­tion­al­ize the act—it places it gen­tly into the wind and earth, where the body is low­ered, and grief fol­lows. The wind “howls” as though mourn­ing itself has tak­en shape in nature, and the bur­ial feels more like an exile than a rite. No prayers are spo­ken over the grave. The weight of judg­ment lingers, not from divine realms, but from those left behind, too unsure how to mourn a life end­ed by choice. In this por­tray­al, the chap­ter refus­es to soft­en the pain or pro­vide com­fort. It mere­ly presents the still­ness left in the wake of despair, a silence deep­er than any pause in music or mar­riage. Through it, we sense not only death but the ache of what could not be spo­ken in life.

The scene shifts to an old­er, dark­er tradition—a corpse, nailed into the earth to pre­vent its wan­der­ing. Here, rit­u­al and myth blur into hor­ror as the phys­i­cal becomes grotesque­ly sym­bol­ic. The body, pinned beneath the soil with iron stakes, begins its long return to earth. The flesh peels, the bones set­tle, and the sea­sons turn with­out mer­cy. Above the grave, a woman appears—her fig­ure pale, unnamed, and timeless—suggesting a love sto­ry lost to mem­o­ry. Her vis­its, silent and sor­row­ful, echo the guilt and long­ing that cling to the liv­ing far longer than any for­mal mourn­ing. Nature takes the body back, yet the spir­it of what was left unre­solved lingers like a cold breath across the grass. It is not ter­ror that fills these pages, but tragedy—the kind that no rit­u­al can pin down.

Over time, the body beneath the cross-roads decom­pos­es into frag­ments, with only bone remain­ing, curled tight­ly around the final iron nail. This image becomes a stark metaphor for mem­o­ry held fast by pain, and for the futil­i­ty of try­ing to bury con­se­quence with tra­di­tion. The grave becomes part of the earth, but the sto­ry refus­es to be buried. Its pres­ence hums under the sur­face of every path that cross­es above. Peo­ple pass unaware, yet some­thing remains unset­tled, as if the stake holds not the dead but the lin­ger­ing weight of their unfin­ished sto­ries. The nat­ur­al world does not protest; it sim­ply con­tin­ues, indif­fer­ent yet obser­vant, wear­ing away the traces of both body and bur­den.

The Cross-Roads ulti­mate­ly blends domes­tic grief, cul­tur­al super­sti­tion, and goth­ic imagery to craft a med­i­ta­tion on the spaces we can­not escape—marriage, mem­o­ry, and mor­tal­i­ty. The emo­tion­al unrav­el­ing of Char­lot­ta par­al­lels the phys­i­cal decay of the corpse, both nar­ra­tives root­ed in the pain of absence and the silence of dis­con­nec­tion. Through inti­mate sor­row and rit­u­al hor­ror, the chap­ter reflects on what endures after death: not breath, but echoes—of love, of loss, of what was nev­er spo­ken aloud. The cross-roads become not just a bur­ial site, but a metaphor for the deci­sions that define us, and the haunt­ing weight of the paths we nev­er choose to take.