This Is Where It Happens
Serial killer of the mountains, playing the long game
It was a love for the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Melanie came east for college and then stayed, moving to Asheville to live with the boy she started dating senior year. She got two jobs, mornings as a barista at Izzy’s Coffee Den, and afternoons a few blocks over at Downtown Books & News, where she worked the register and tidied the shelves and read behind the counter to pass the time. And when the relationship ended, not in screams and accusations but in acknowledgements and long, melting hugs, Melanie still felt good about her choice: her selected town was beautiful and intentional, bursting with charm in the form of art or nature at every sightline. Anarchist-allegiant shops dotted Haywood, and musicians played on street corners for love of the sound. The food was great, the locals leaked kindness, and something arty was happening most nights. But above it all, the surrounding topography, framing the city and spreading out for miles past. There, in the mountains, she felt free.
On weekday afternoons, after Betty (who owned the bookstore) came for the closing shift, Melanie took the long way home. The drive from work to her small house was eight minutes if you took it straight, but Melanie rarely did, opting instead for the winding roads of the Blue Ridge Parkway, container of the most swelling sights her eyes had ever taken in. The views socked her enough to try to take up painting. On Sunday mornings when the weather was nice, she hiked the mountains with friends she made downtown. In the summer, parties unfurled on cleared lots with views of the sky and distant peaks, bright firecracker bursts of sound and light around the 4th, American-held celebration, pride and pageantry and self, so much self.
She met him on a Sunday morning in the middle of July.
Her friend group usually did one of a dozen two-to-three-mile-long loops, ending back where they started. On that particular day, after saying bye and watching them drive away from the pull-off spot everyone used for parking, Melanie clicked open her car, retrieved her Canon PowerShot, and walked back up the trail. There was a view nearby she wanted to photograph — it would make a good study for a sketch. She reached the spot no problem and snapped a bunch of pictures. Just as she wrapped it, she heard the snap of twigs and rustle of fabric behind her.
Melanie turned as a man came into view. A moment of nerves — the same feeling she always got when she was alone and a strange man approached — but this guy was smiling big and she got the impression, in the sudden and total way intuition settles, impossible to pinpoint, that he was one of the good ones. Would probably help her with the bear.
“Oh my gosh, that view!” the stranger said by way of greeting.
Melanie held up her camera. “I just took like fifty pictures.”
“You a photographer?”
“No, it’s for a study.”
“Oh, so you’re a painter.”
Melanie shrugged. “I mean, I try. But I wouldn’t say I know what I’m doing.”
The man nodded. “That’s exactly how I feel about my life.”
Melanie laughed. On sight, she was drawn to his long hair, transitional glasses, mud-stained canvas shirt, and sandals that were totally inappropriate for the activity. It didn’t hurt that his smile was wide, contagious, and seemed eager to stick around.
They chatted some more, light and easy, the toss of words back and forth.
And when he introduced himself — “I’m Goldie, as in Goldilocks, only that’s not my name, so not really like that” — the feeling of intuition was so strong and natural, the inverse of how it went, first meeting, with all three of her college boyfriends, that she was smitten. She didn’t stop to consider what it might take to charm someone in her tan shorts and red-soled hiking boots.
They kept talking on the short walk to her car and when they reached it, Melanie was enough out on the dock that she just stood there, waiting, red-cheeked, the picture of hopeful expectancy. He asked for her number and she blushed even harder and said, “Finally. There it is. Give me your phone and I’ll put it in.”
“Oh, that might be a problem.” Goldie’s hair framed his head like a mane. He wore a few days’ growth of beard.
“What’s the problem?”
“I don’t own a cell phone.”
“Are you serious?”
He shrugged. “What do they call it? Off the grid? That’s how I like it. I have an old-fashioned rotary in my house and a whole buncha wires and stuff. That’s it.”
“What does that mean, you don’t use the internet?”
He scratched a mole on his neck. “I have a computer for the web, but I barely ever plug it in.” From his pocket, he pulled out a pen and small notebook.
Melanie took it and wrote down her digits.
He took back his notebook. “Ever been to Graveyard Fields?”
“Never,” Melanie said. “Is it, like, a cemetery?”
“No, I don’t know why they call it that. It’s just a place. Beautiful waterfalls and great hiking. We should go sometime.”
“Okay.”
He looked happy enough to die.
Goldie called her the very next day.
They chatted easy about nothing, everything, their days and the weather (“Liable to melt you like ice in a pan,” which Melanie found delightful) and the local news of water-outage preparation and how it might affect their daily showering. They scheduled their first date for two days later, Wednesday afternoon, at Graveyard Fields. Melanie was all excited to trek a part of the Blue Ridge Mountains she had never been and which looked positively stunning online, but at noon on the day the weather took an unexpectedly wet turn, the sky cracking to announce itself, and their plans shifted accordingly.
They met instead at Jack of the Wood, which Goldie suggested, citing the old-time jam sessions where participants cycled through traditional Appalachian folk songs. The biscuits and gravy were hot, the beer was cold, and the music was an exact replica of the precise southern fare that first entrapped Melanie after watching a bluegrass documentary to apply to a bunch of schools in North and South Carolina, as well as one in Georgia (the only school that hadn’t accepted her — she still bore a grudge against the whole state). She lost herself clapping and shaking and moving to the sounds made by smiling musicians manipulating their instruments.
At the end of the night, Goldie walked her to her car. “This is nice. I don’t usually do it like this.”
“What do you mean?”
He gestured vaguely at the dark hulk of mountains in the distance. The night was clear, the stars crowning everything with their totality. “I tend to date different.”
“Different how?”
He shrugged. “Oh, one-night stands, I guess.” He met her eyes. “That’s my history. Meet ‘em and do it right away. But this feels right better. Taking it slow. Long term.”
She nodded. “I was similar in college. Hooked up with a lot of random guys I never wanted to see again the second I left their bed.” She paused. “And honestly, sometimes while I was still in it.” She touched his shoulder. “No more one-night stands. This is so much nicer. So much more intimate.”
“So much more intimate,” Goldie agreed. “No more one-night stands.”
Melanie stood on her tiptoes until her face was right next to his.
Their first kiss was soft, long, and quiet. It was, to Melanie, wonderful.
On her drive home, she kept playing the kiss over and over. Goldie’s face, his hand on her waist, the chapped surface of his lips pressing into hers. She liked what she felt and the possibilities of what lay there.
Long term.
Slowness in dating was nice.
Goldie was funny and kind and always paid for everything. He knew which bars had the best live music on weeknights and the location of every hike and swimming hole worth visiting. He took her for long drives along the Parkway and told her about eating at 12 Bones with his aunt as a kid, when it was just a BBQ shack by the river.
Melanie liked that he didn’t get heated by her occasional mispronunciations of Appalachia, which she still said three times out of ten like the Sacramento girl she was: “Apple-ay-cha.”
“It’s ‘Appalachia,’ like somebody ‘threw an apple-atcha,’” he said the first time she butchered it. After that, whenever she said it wrong, he reached into an invisible tree, got into his southpaw wind-up, and mock-hurled an apple at her.
She liked his creativity. It felt like most people in Asheville were artists or artistically minded, and although Melanie absolutely was not, her feeble attempts at painting aside, she liked that Goldie always seemed to have some kind of project going: pottery making, mushroom foraging, building bike trails in the mountains.
She didn’t love that Goldie had no phone. It was admirable in terms of his hard stand against the consumerism and dollar-sign end-game technology tried impressing, but man did it get lonely to date someone and not be able to text him.
Of course, Goldie had his guardrails. He became withdrawn all three times Melanie brought up his past — all she could pull was that he barely knew his birth parents and was raised by an aunt he hadn’t talked to in years — and although he was friendly with everyone everywhere they went, he wasn’t especially close with anybody. Melanie noticed that most of his social exchanges ended at hello and how are you, rarely delving past platitudes. Also, he seemed proud that he hadn’t left North Carolina in years and shared a special disdain for people “who go to New York to find themselves, as if the Parkway doesn’t exist.” Melanie had family in the Bronx and thought that was an incredibly limited view, but she kept her mouth shut.
One red flag. The repeat of a thing he said, first on their third date, a small picnic near the footbridge on the campus of Warren Wilson College, and again on their fifth, at the Sonic Drive-Thru off U.S. 70, a setting that might’ve felt lazy if not for the remarkable effort of the trees and the rising land all around them. On both occasions, after eating, Goldie took a long pull on his beverage and wiped his lips with his inner wrist. “I’ve never told this to another living soul,” he said, every word the same. “But I get this feeling with you. Like I could unzip myself and let me crawl out. And you wouldn’t run. You wouldn’t run.” The first time he said it, Melanie hugged him, melting at the sight of his raw vulnerability, an open dip of land in a steady plain. But then he said the exact same thing at the Sonic in the exact same tone. It eeked the fuck out of her to hear him say, again, I’ve never told this to another living soul, with that same glassy conviction. The same line at the end repeated twice. It read like a man who spent his time practicing sincerity. In contrast to his admission, it made the skeleton in her own body want to stand up, climb out of her, and walk off. But the moment passed, and then it was later and she was back in her house, playing it over and over until at least five small rationalizations popped up. None alone was enough, but together they built a fortress against her better mind, fighting on behalf of their queen, her loneliness.
And then there was the matter of their physical relationship. Although they’d hung out six times since their first meeting and ended every date with a kiss, they had yet to do anything else. The last two times they kissed good night, Melanie attempted escalation. First, she invited him back to hers, but he politely declined, saying he had to feed Marcello, his thirteen-year-old ink-black cat. The second time, mid-kiss, she went so far to take his hand and place it on her right boob. He smiled, saying that he really wanted to, but was more interested in “continuing the long term.”
“You know that long term involves sex, right?”
Goldie smiled and took back his hand. “I know that, yes. But I want to wait for our big trip.”
“Oh yeah?” Melanie said. “What big trip is that?”
“The one we planned before the rain. Graveyard Fields.”
“Oh.” Melanie felt a jolt of disappointment. Hikes were fine, nice, but in terms of sleeping with him for the first time, she’d much rather a home or a hotel — any place with a bed — instead of trees, dirt paths, the ground, and the sky. But then she realized that what he meant was they would sleep together for the first time after hiking at Graveyard Fields, and that gave her a thrill.
And so, a day later, when Goldie called to tell her that the forecast for the following afternoon looked good for a trip to Graveyard Fields, Melanie was buzzing.
She scheduled an appointment with a waxing specialist in town and bought a new pair of matching bra and panties that she figured would titillate even after a two-plus-hour hike. Melanie knew the antidote to loneliness, which she’d lived with her whole life, and it was always different versions of the same thing: other people.
Their final date was a Thursday afternoon.
Melanie called out from her shift at the coffee shop to make it work. She needed the funds, but Goldie insisted it was much better to visit on a day other than the weekend. He picked her up in his weathered red Chevy truck, which had a wheelless bicycle and a few unpainted trail heads in the bed. She jumped in the passenger seat and was cheered to hear country music booming from the speakers.
The drive out to the area was long but nice, down a stretch that included enough dips onto the Parkway to chill her with the quiet awe that came from viewing mountains as far off as light allowed. The music was good and gave way to other songs, some that Melanie recognized, and at one point she rolled down her window to scream-sing along with Tom Petty.
Goldie didn’t speak much, just smiled, keeping rhythm against the steering wheel. He clearly enjoyed her presence. But he also seemed walled off. They turned off at Exit 21, following a route that Goldie seemed to have memorized, and then her illusion of security shattered.
The song they were listening to stopped abruptly and was replaced by a ringtone.
“Whoops, my bad,” Goldie said, his first words in thirty minutes. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a phone, a totally normal run-of-the-mill smartphone, and glanced at the screen.
Melanie did, too.
Spam Likely, it read.
Goldie pressed the red button. Immediately the ringtone stopped and the song resumed.
Melanie sat there. She was shaking. “What, what is that?”
“Hmm,” Goldie looked at her. “What is what?”
“That phone?”
“This?” He held it up. “Yeah, this is my phone.”
Their first encounter echoed in her head, a loud gong, over and over.
“But why would you…” She caught herself, started again. “Why did you say you don’t have one?”
“Why did I say I don’t have a phone?” Goldie eased the car up a steep turn. “I said that?”
“What? Of course you did. The first time we met. Are you serious? It’s why you call me from a landline.”
“Right, right,” Goldie said. “I think I said when we first met that I never use my phone. Of course I have one. How could I not?”
Melanie hated that. It was downright gaslighting and like waves of heat shimmer above a leaking stove, it made her world ripple, mirage-like, moving in stillness.
Goldie noticed her retreat. “Wait, don’t go away like that! It’s nothing, what’s the word, bad-intentioned. It’s more like, I used it when I used to drive Uber.” His smile was good-natured, his eyelids heavy. There was a steeliness to his voice. “But I never use it socially or anything. I’m sure I said all that.”
“You didn’t, though,” Melanie said softly.
He kept driving.
They reached a part of road with plenty of shoulder space for parking. Only one other car was there. Goldie parked and got out, bringing a tote bag with him.
Melanie followed him from the vehicle. She felt faint, fawning. It was neither flight nor fight, nor was she frozen. She walked because it made the world quiet enough to let her brain think.
“What’s in the bag?” she asked, putting on a false cheer.
“Snacks and drinks. You hungry?”
She shook her head, kept the smile.
They hiked a well-worn path in silence. Melanie barely noticed her surroundings, so caught was she in her thoughts. It was fucked enough that he lied about the phone, but his secondary lies, his explanations, were even worse. This was absolutely not the way, going further into the shrubbery with a man who would lie like that. And yet her feet stepped, each lift and fall a silent betrayal.
Goldie slowed down as they neared a thirty-foot waterfall.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Either he didn’t clock her ongoing turmoil or he chose to ignore it. “There’s another one, too. A better one. A little higher up. More private, and such a view. I want to take you there.”
Melanie shrugged. “Why don’t we stay here? It’s beautiful.” Two people sat on the stones surrounding this waterfall. And with them around— she jumped hard on the thought. To surface it was to birth it.
“It’s more beautiful up there.” Goldie held up his tote bag. It read NC’s Finest! “Up there’s what I want to show you.”
Melanie nodded, a fawn in a field.
They kept walking, passing an odd assortment of tree stumps, a lot of them.
Goldie turned off the trail, a route he clearly knew, although it was unmarked.
Melanie hesitated.
“Oh, it’s fine!” he said. “The view is incredible. It’s just ahead. It’s worth it. I promise.”
This was where she called it. No way she was getting off the path with him. He was smiling broadly at her, a nice smile, but it didn’t matter, for her it was forever dented. “I don’t want to leave the trail.”
“Why not?” He was still smiling. “I’m telling you, it’s safe. It’s right up here.”
Melanie didn’t speak. She stared at the strange man but could not conjure the words. To answer him was to say it out loud, which was a way to make it real, a genuine possibility. To keep quiet was to still believe.
She followed him off the trail. After a time, Melanie tried a different tactic, talking. “So, um, you said you used to drive Uber?” As she spoke, she held her cheeks in the pose of a smile, remembering something from a freshman psychology class.
“I did. But I didn’t love it.” He turned back so she could hear. “Long hours, lots of circling, and there weren’t always, what do you call ‘em, fares. But it wasn’t all bad. It’s how I met the others. The ones I told you about. The one-night stands.”
Melanie felt light like helium. “You… you dated girls you met driving home in your car?”
Goldie didn’t answer. He had stopped walking and was pointing to a large rock. A small opening to the side brushed against a huge pine tree. The roar from a nearby waterfall was loud. “The view from here. It’ll lay you out.” He gestured, “Ladies first.”
Melanie didn’t move.
Goldie gave her a look. “Need help?” He held up a hand.
She shook her head. She did not want him to touch her ever again.
“Then what are you waiting for?”
Soon, this would all be done. Playing the acquiescent girlfriend a final time — short term, this was so fucking short term — Melanie stepped into the trim space between the rock and the trees.
She was in a clearing. The framing rock made two walls, and the opposite end was packed with short bristling pines. There was a large space in the middle, empty except for tree needles and dirt. Through the branches, Melanie spotted a second, smaller waterfall. No one was gathered around it.
She turned just as Goldie entered behind her.
“Yes,” he said, looking around, clearly content. He beamed at her. “This is where it happens.” And he reached into his bag.
This was where it happened with Livi.
A passenger he dropped off on a late night two Novembers back. Drunk enough to engage in his fish-chat, she offered that she lived with a roommate, who was currently out of town. Home in Florida for Thanksgiving. Livi had the mark. It was red, an ongoing red rising from her left shoulder, continual sparking, the sign that stirred the gold dust within him. It was lust, for flesh and for blood, but it was also a want for the dust, dust of the stars that made him what he was. After watching her enter her home, he parked on a side street and waited fifty minutes. Then he walked around the house and jiggled the back door open, using a piece he bought online. So easy it was criminal. He stepped in the strange house. The smells were different and there was a perfume-like trim to the air. She was asleep and he overpowered her easily. He dragged her to his car and started the drive to the mountain. They arrived at 3 am and he forced her, hands tied, mouth stuffed, to hike to the place with the view. As the waterfall crashed below, he thrashed above, keeping at it until her living perfume became the mortal one.
This was where it happened with Brook. Another fare, this one late in the afternoon. At least a year after Livi. By that point in his career as a self-styled mover of people, he had completed several hundred rides, but Brook was only the second one with red sparks over her left shoulder. She was more reserved, and didn’t answer when he fish-fed for her living situation. And so when he dropped her off, a wise girl disappearing forever under normal non-sparking circumstances, he watched her small attached house. Two hours later, a man left, her boyfriend or possibly husband. It was risky, but he trusted the sparks to protect him. He got out of his car and tried the front door. Unlocked. Neighbors were so trusting, right up to their end. Brook was in the bedroom, lying on her stomach, wearing a tee shirt and underwear, watching something on a laptop. She heard him, turned, and screamed, although she stopped with one swing of the iron. He carried her quickly to his car and from there it was a drive to the place. Her head was bleeding, and she was out of it, which made the walk up the mountain difficult. Still, the sparks never once stopped and he knew he was bathing in their death-light, the end of the shards that created him. It felt nice and warm, what sex was supposed to be, an honor. He waited until nightfall to rouse her in his special place, altar of the shards.
This was where it happened with Nneka. Five months later. She was a late-night fare, and he saw the sparks before he even saw her face. Didn’t hurt that her face was pretty as any girl’s he’d ever seen up close. Shortly after she entered his car, he turned to ask a question, but really to get a full view of that face. He wanted to see it at rest, in comfort, before her fate entered and turned down her natural beauty. Fright, a ready crumbler. She told him she was visiting from Charlotte and staying at an Airbnb for a week. Another gamble, since that made cameras likely. But he was still a servant to the sparks, and they had not yet led him wrong. Trust, in this matter, was very important. He dropped her off and waited ten minutes before knocking on the front door. When she opened, he said he was so sorry but he knocked over a small garden gnome on his way out. He didn’t want her to get in trouble, but he didn’t know what to do. She told him to wait and disappeared into the house, returning in a hoodie she was zipping up. She followed him outside to his car to check it out. That angel of his, the prettiest one. She was also the easiest, barely resisting when he put his hands on her and not screaming once when he tied her and then gagged her or, later, when they walked up the mountain together. All three of them, one-night stands. Met on the day it went. A kicking alignment of the sparks, although not the only way.
“What do you mean?” Melanie’s voice was glass. “This is where what happens?”
But then he rushed at her, so sudden that she had no time to react, or to try to defend herself, and he pushed, hard, so that she toppled backwards against the rock. She knocked her head against the stone and things spun black.
She came to, a time later. A crackling whirlwind behind her forehead.
Goldie was speaking. “But with the red, how could I not? That’s how I learned to sing. Sing a song of past times, of last times and the dark. Also, the dance. Sas-pa-rilla! Whee-oo, whee-oo, whee-oo! Does anyone remember that? Oh fritzel, doesn’t matter. I tell ya, Mama, she did and she does. She gives and she hugs. I see it, but I won’t touch it ‘cause I don’t want to burn.”
Melanie tried taking a deep breath and immediately began coughing up a lung.
Her captor turned to her. “Welcome back,” he said. “Just in time for round two.”
And he pressed his hands around her neck, hard, so hard, like scissors on paper, until she gave in to pressure and blacked out once more.
The next time she returned, the first thing she saw was the tote bag on the dirt floor. Ropes spooled from it, but none were around her. She shuffled a little, making sure to keep quiet. A soft light shone from somewhere. The world had significantly darkened since her last turn of consciousness.
Goldie was once more delivering a passionate soliloquy to no one. The steeliness in his voice was as terrifying as his words.
“Marcello of the countertop. Teacher on the mountain, of the laws, of the lords. Can’t wait to get back and tell him everything. I told him about last girl for a whole day. He was so impressed. Even brought me a roach. Can you believe before him I hated cats? Don’t misdirect me. No, not at all. Not for me, anyway. I can’t even remember, so don’t you ask. For me it’s about the red. Red red red. I speak a lot to them. They used to not like the carts. But then I found Marcello. He attacked me at first, and that’s how I knew I was forgiven for hurting those cats at grandpa’s. What’s that? Only way, everyone knows. You don’t feel it if you pass. Marcello forgave me and then taught me. He taught me the shortcuts and the longs. He taught me the world of the life-takers. How fun it is to play. How fun it is to take.”
Melanie tried to keep silent, but her throat hurt so bad. She made a wheezing noise as she tried to pull in a deep breath.
“Oh good, you’re back.”
And then he choked her again until she was no longer back.
She emerged again, groggy. A sound. Loud and shaking. She tried to focus. It was hard. The sound again, that movement. She tried again. It was him, his body. It was smacking against the ground. A short distance from her. He was sobbing, crying, hitting the stone floor, making a noise like nothing she ever heard. Maybe it was her ears, maybe they were damaged. It was hard to focus. The whole thing felt swimmy, in and out of a side light. He was a king, on a throne somewhere and she was his death toy, bringer of the message, that awful awful noise. It was bad, but feelings were lighter than feathers. Even the pain in her throat cut out. Feathers. Feathers. Feathers. She tried to focus. Was it pine needles? It was hard. She drifted again to the place.
She came back. Her shirt and shorts had been removed, revealing the pink bra and panties she bought a million years ago. Her face was covered in snot and tears and a root jabbed into her spine. The pain in her throat was titanic, red and sharp, a colony of fire ants consuming her. The world was clear, and for that she was grateful.
“Even if he disagrees, I don’t care. It’s all the reason this wonders.” She tuned his words in and out. “Act ‘em, play ‘em, and from there watch it spark. I liked this. I liked long this with this one. Long terming the thing. Long terminals. Like in the night sky. These big old hands. All that shaking and rocking. Socking and cooking. So much better now. So much more, what’s the word, intimate.”
He was facing away. In the moonlight, his back was illuminated. All his clothes were off. Melanie weakly raised a hand to her throat. It enabled her to suck in a breath, quietly enough that Goldie didn’t turn. He kept speaking, but she wasn’t listening. A soft light came from a patch in the clearing, and she saw it was his illicit phone, either recording the happenings or just letting them be seen. Melanie stared at the phone. It was closer to her than to him, just barely.
She kept her hand on her throat, breathing, thinking, not wanting to end.
Goldie was still reciting his broken words, but he was also now on his knees, like in prayer, facing a patch of rock. This was it, now or nothing, fight for the continuation or accept death. And even though her body attacked her, sharp pangs in her neck and head with each movement, she slowly worked her way up and reached for the phone.
Goldie was still kneeling, although he had lowered his chest to his thighs so he was now closer to child’s pose, his bare butt rising in the air.
Melanie crawled over, expecting him to turn and attack at any second, but he didn’t. Until she was right beside him, at which point he noticed her and turned, a blank smile on his face. That was all it took.
Melanie lifted the phone, a solid rectangle made of metal, plastic, and glass, and brought it down onto his face as hard as she could.
Goldie shrieked, but Melanie kept hitting him with his own phone. She made contact with his nose and heard a crunch. And with that, amid Goldie’s howls and a gush of blood, she ran out of the small stone clearing.
She held up the phone, using its light to orient herself. Her throat wheezed horribly, brokenly. The stars were hidden, there were no sparks anywhere in the vicinity. She heard Goldie behind her, cursing, shouting, running in her direction. Easy enough. She turned the light off and stepped behind a large tree trunk, watching as the injured man sprinted past her, blood dripping from his busted nose, trying to find his escaped victim.
She waited a minute until she no longer heard his footsteps or screams.
The phone screen was cracked and wore a few droplets of blood, but thankfully there was service. Just barely, but enough to reach 9-1-1. The dispatcher told her to stay on the line, and she did just that, hugging the tree with one arm while the other caressed her damaged throat.
And when she heard the approach of sirens, she smiled, even through the pain.
Because, in that moment, the pain didn’t feel like pain. It felt like freedom, finally, from the death-prison of this fated night; freedom, in some way, from herself, ending like it started in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the site of her sacrifice, but also her salvation, both at the hands of the never-ending all-consuming self.