The shadows were long in the garden and dusk was settling over the field below the hill when Sam and Frodo returned to the Old Sackville Place. Thimula had left the front door unlocked that afternoon and Frodo tentatively pushed it open. Inside, the house was dark even though some of the window shutters were also left open. Sam had brought candles and matches, and he lit them for Frodo and himself before they ventured into the entry hall. The first rooms they looked into were cleaner than they'd been when they'd seen them yesterday. In addition to burning rubbish and removing the grimy dust-covers, Thimula had swept up and knocked down the heavier cobwebs from the ceilings.
They ventured into the room where Wormtongue had died. It seemed the best place to begin. Frodo noted that the door hinges creaked as he pushed it open.
Thimula had also straightened up in here a little. The floor was swept and the old bedclothes removed, but the dark stain on the floorboards remained. Frodo recalled an old tale in Minas Tirith about a bloodstain on a tavern floor that could never be washed away, and he wondered what Thimula would do if she couldn't rid the house of this one.
"What if he doesn't show up tonight?" Sam wondered.
"Then we shall have to come back tomorrow, and every night 'til he does," answered Frodo. "We must settle this before Thimula tries to move in. I won't have her meeting a ghost in her own home." Although that was precisely what he meant to do now, he found he wasn't as frightened as he thought he'd be: meeting the ghost of a mere Man, however wretched, wasn't as terrible a prospect as confronting Saruman's vengeful spirit. He could face Wormtongue, living or dead.
Bracing himself, he called out: "Grima Wormtongue! Are you here? Show yourself."
There was no reply, except for a faint whisper of disturbed dust settling.
After waiting for some minutes for Wormtongue to appear, they left the bedroom and went in search of him, moving as quietly as only hobbits could. Frodo walked ahead, bearing his candle before him; Sam followed cautiously, peering into the shadows of every nook and doorway they passed. Thimula had done some cleaning in the front rooms, but the cobwebs still hung thick overhead in the rest of the house. The slender tips of tree roots that had broken through the plaster plucked at their sleeves and trouser legs, and the dust from the fallen plaster caked the bottoms of their feet. The Sackville Place was a spacious home, taking up most of the hilltop, but as they crept down the darkened corridors from room to empty room, it seemed enormous--even larger than Brandy Hall.
Then, in one long and windowless tunnel on the westward side of the house, Sam suddenly froze in his tracks. "D'you hear that?" he hissed to Frodo, who was several feet farther along the hallway. "That isn't no echo!"
Frodo heard it too: the soft sound of footsteps. No, it couldn't be an echo tonight, for neither of them was moving. The sound was coming from some distant part of the house--slow, steady, measured thumps, heavier than a hobbit's feet. The rusted hinge of a door or window-shutter creaked, and the thumps grew a little louder. "I think it's coming nearer," he hissed in reply.
Sam nodded, then his gaze focused on a point beyond Frodo and he gasped.
Frodo whirled around to see the dark-clad, ashen-faced figure standing at the end of the tunnel behind him, staring at him intensely with black and rheumy eyes. Frodo couldn't be frightened by this apparition; Wormtongue's ghost looked more pitiful than terrifying, for those eyes fixed upon him held no malice, only the bleak sadness of long suffering without hope of release. Whatever kept his spirit here, it was a torment.
"Grima," Frodo addressed him. It seemed disrespectful and not at all productive to call the dead Man by his usual nickname. "Do you remember me? You once spared my life, and struck at Saruman when you might've killed me instead at his command. I can't forget that and because of it, I believe you are not beyond reach." The figure did not move. "It must be awful to be trapped here, alone, restless and driven to walk the night. We've come to help free you, if we can." Frodo took a tentative step forward--with Sam stepping up quickly, protectively, to his side--but before they could approach the figure, it vanished.
"What is it you want?" Frodo demanded of the empty air. "What can we do to see you to rest?"
As if in answer, they heard the footsteps retreating rapidly through the darkened house, and a door's hinges creaked, then another door much farther away. "Come on, Sam! He's leading us!" Frodo said before darting down the passageway in the direction of the sound.
The tunnel led into another that turned toward the back of the house. The door connecting them stood slightly ajar; Frodo pushed through it and raced on. His candle had gone out, but there was a faint, silvery light coming through an open door or window ahead and he went toward it.
He was out-of-doors before he realized it. Sam, who had been running to keep up with him, now ran into him and nearly knocked him over.
They were standing in a grassy dell at the bottom of the garden. The open door, now behind them, was at the back of the house, just before the brick-lined tunnel that led to the kitchen; the turf-covered roof of this tunnel also lay behind them, and a bright, silvery full moon had risen above it. Frodo turned quickly away from it--since the incident at the standing stones in Budlingsbank last autumn, he could never bear to look at the "face" of the full moon.
In the moonlight, another white face was visible. A dark-clad figure stood on the rising ground above the dell, not five yards away--but it was no ghost. Thimula was staring with wide and astonished eyes at some distant point among a line of trees.
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