Alpha: Darth Garou

Beta: RaisingCaiin

Thanks so much, to both of you.

Summary: It was in March of the 2989th year of the Third Age, 1389 by Shire-reckoning, that Bilbo Baggins went drinking with a few friends and did not return home later that night. Of course, investigations of more and less seriousness were conducted by people with more and less authority to do so; but since nobody had been around to actually see an accident or a vanishing, no solution to incident could be found, and the hobbits of the Shire had to content themselves with the fact that the Second Disappearance of Bilbo Baggins would remain an unsolved mystery.

When the mayor of Michel-Delving deemed that they had waited long enough to exclude a sudden, unexpected reappearance of Bilbo it was at last decided that it was time that Bilbo's estate and assets should go to the person determined in Bilbo's will...


This story, alas, begins with a tragedy – as so many stories of eventual great importance are wont to do.

It was in March of the 2989th year of the Third Age, 1389 by Shire-reckoning, that Bilbo Baggins, head of the Baggins family and local oddball, went drinking with a few friends and did not return home later that night. Nor, for that matter, later that week or month or even that year.

Of course, investigations of more and less seriousness were conducted by people with more and less authority to do so; with the former trying their best to solve this unwelcome mystery, while the latter busied themselves with embellishing the story with even more rumours or asking absolutely uncalled-for questions whether Bilbo had vanished (again!) or died (for real, this time) and if so, how he had gone about it without anyone noticing.

These investigations, however, yielded nothing. His drinking companions of that evening, one Griffo Boffin, old Hamfast Gamgee, and Isenbras Took could merely report that Bilbo had been in good spirits that evening (in more than one sense), and maybe even in too good spirits, because other folk had seen him leaving the Green Dragon in Bywater with a noticeable weave in his step. It seemed not at all unlikely that Bilbo might have stopped on the bridge over the Water and, by accident, tumbled over the side and drowned like the parents of poor Frodo Baggins nine years prior. Others said that he had simply wandered off to visit Elves and other strange folk again, and that it was not so unlike Bilbo to do it without even packing and locking his front door – this particular version of the story was mostly accompanied by put-upon sighs and shaking heads. (Other, more ill-willed tongues even mentioned discreetly that Bilbo might have gone so far as to get it into his head to go boating while drunk that night, since Bagginses seemed to have no common hobbit-sense where deep water was concerned. But those rumours were never uttered aloud and eventually died along with all other speculations going round in the Shire.)

But since nobody had been around to actually see an accident or a vanishing, no definite solution to the curious circumstances of the night of the 21st of March 1389 could be found, and the hobbits of the Shire had to content themselves with the fact that the Second Disappearance of Bilbo Baggins, as it came to be called, would remain an unsolved mystery. Soon, folk had other, more pressing things on their minds and as they lost interest in the case, the rumour mill in the West Farthing slowed down and, eventually, stilled.

Thus it came to be, that a year after his disappearance, just shy of the date of his 100th birthday, Bilbo Baggins was pronounced Dead-or-Missing, permanently. And since the mayor of Michel-Delving, with whom the hobbits had conferred upon this matter, deemed that they had waited long enough to exclude a sudden, unexpected reappearance of Bilbo (which had been vexing and very embarrassing for everyone involved the last time it had happened) it was decided that it was time that Bilbo's estate and assets should finally go to either the person determined in Bilbo's will (provided he had had the foresight to write one) or, lacking that, the highest bidder at an auction.

Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, who was naturally present during this meeting, didn't even wait for the mayor to finish his sentence before she stood and ran out of the town hall, leapt on her pony and spurred it to its quickest trot in the direction of her house in Bywater. It was late at night when she arrived, but nonetheless she did not even bother to tie her pony to the hitching rail before bursting into the house, rushing into her bedroom and shaking her sleep-dazzled husband out of bed.

"Lobll'a?" Otho murmured. "What in the name of Bandobras Took – "

"Get up," Lobelia hissed, "we have to get to Bag End before anyone notices. Bilbo's estate is about to be given over to his heir, and I will be dead in the ground before that old wastrel plays another jest on us to trick us out of our inheritance again."

Otho blinked. "… what?" He sat up in bed, his hair sticking up in all directions and his round face confused in the silver moonlight slanting in through the round windows. "What do you even plan to do?" he asked, a slight tremor in his voice.

"Wake Lotho," Lobelia ordered grimly. "Tell him to dress in dark clothes. And get your stationery from the desk." When he just gave her a fearful glance, Lobelia swatted him over the head. "Now!"


Two hours and a lot of exhausting scurrying from tree to tree and bush to bush later, found Lobelia, Otho, and their son Lotho standing before the door of Bag End.

"This will be the end of the Sackville-Bagginses as a respectful family," Lotho whined, which was something he had done with great persistence for the entirety of their trek to Bag End. "You know how these damned Hobbitoners are – eyes that can see in the dark, and their noses pressed up to the windows, there is no way they have not seen us!"

Lobelia didn't grace it with an answer. She knew that this was exactly how hobbits were, mainly because she was a woman who catalogued the comings and goings of her neighbours with great diligence herself. And while she had no problem in pointing out flaws in others that she displayed herself, this was not the time to get into an argument with her son.

"Be quiet," she said. "We are securing your future fortune, and you should thank us instead of yammering."

"Yes, about that," Otho said, who had been ducking into the vegetable patch in the front garden in a surprisingly successful attempt to blend in with the fat pumpkins there. "What are we doing here, Lobelia? It is the middle of the night and we have been sneaking all through Hobbiton like thieves..."

"We," Lobelia said with great determination, "are taking care to right things, since nobody else will apparently do right by us in this damned town. Go and check the front door."

"Do what?" Otho squeaked.

Lobelia just rolled her eyes and then stepped forward to turn the knob on the garish green door of Bag End, silver-grey in the moonlight. She was only half-surprised when it actually swung open to the inside. It was so very Bilbo-ish have a drink and then run off or die without locking his door like any normal hobbit would do.

Well, it seemed that she would not need her lockpicks after all.

"Mother," Lotho said slowly, as she stepped over the threshold and into the oddly silent vestibule. "Mother, we should not be doing this."

"This whole venture is something a poor, old woman like me should not have to be doing," Lobelia growled. "Alas, nobody is asking us. Now get inside before anyone sees us, you oafs!"

The two hobbit-men hurriedly scampered inside, where they huddled into a corner in order to stand in the shadows and away from the windows, breathing heavily. Lobelia threw them a glare before shutting the door and then moving about the house closing all the window shutters. She banged her toes against a table two times and nearly stumbled over the damned piles of books Bilbo had left everywhere three times, and when she returned to the vestibule where her two useless companions where still cowering, she was duly aggravated.

"Candles," she demanded and she did not even sigh when Otho did not light them, but instead handed them to her.

"Why did I bring you again?" she muttered and then lit each of the three candles, passing one to her son and her husband, and keeping one for herself. Lobelia cupped her hand around the flame to dampen the glare.

"Now," she said, and when she turned to her husband and her son, it was the grim disappointment of decades speaking through her, "look for anything that resembles a will. Don't hurry and don't be sloppy – we're not leaving before we have found it."

Even with this threat hanging over Otho's and Lotho's head, it took them nearly all night to find it. Of course Bilbo had not left his will in a drawer or in the locked chest in his bedroom like a sensible hobbit would. Lobelia nearly threw her lockpick away in frustration when she had finished digging through all the drawers and chests that seemed like reasonable hiding-places and had still come up empty. It was Lotho who found it eventually, shoved haphazardly between two stacks of manuscripts detailing a mind-boggling episode featuring three talking spiders, which Bilbo must have written down after a particularly bad smoke of spoiled Longbottom Leaf.

Alerted by Lotho's cry of excitement, Lobelia marched into the study and plucked it from his hands, even while he was still doing a little triumphant jig, slammed it down onto a free spot on the horribly disorganised desk and read it through. With every line her brow creased further and when she reached the end of it, her face resembled the snarl of the wolves who had come to the Shire during the Fell Winter in 2912.

Otho and Lotho were wisely standing at a safe distance, when she whirled around.

"Can you believe it?" she said. "Can you believe the audacity of this good-for-nothing fool?" She waved the will around.

"If you would only tell us..." Otho started.

"Here!" Lobelia spat, jabbing a finger at a particularly offensive line. "He actually named that Frodo Baggins heir to all of his assets, his estate, and his property! He does not even know the boy! He hasn't talked to him even once in his life! Rumour has it that he wanted to adopt him, but until now he has left him to rot in Brandy Hall and done nothing – and it is to this – this child that he wants to bequeath the home and the goods that are meant to be mine!"

"Well," Lotho said annoyedly, shoulders hunched nearly up to his ears. "Cousin Frodo is an orphan after all, maybe Bilbo just wanted to do some good by him, who knows – "

"Oh no! He did it to spite me!" Lobelia turned around. "Do you know what Bilbo left to me? Do you know what he wrote? Here: 'And to my esteemed cousin Lobelia I leave my remaining collection of assorted silverware, to complete the part that she has already taken for her own household, given with my sincerest blessings.'"

Lotho raised an eyebrow. "So these spoons that you boasted with in front of Dora Boffin weren't ours after all?"

"They – that is beside the point!" Lobelia screeched. "Do you not care at all that we're being laughed at? Even from the grave the old scoundrel intends to do nothing but thumb his nose at me! But not this time, do you hear, not this time!"

"But what do you want to do?" Otho whined. It would not have taken much more for him to start wringing his hands. "The will is absolutely clear that Frodo gets everything – and everyone who reads it will know."

Lobelia said nothing. Instead of answering, she held up the will, slowly lifting her candle underneath. Otho's and Lotho's eyes widened, but she watched with an unmoving expression as the flames caught at the edge of the will and started to consume the leaf of paper with breathtaking speed in orange-and-red tongues of fire. Afterwards, she fetched a brush she had seen standing around in the vestibule and returned to the study to sweep the ashes under a rug.

"Now," she said, wiping her hands on her skirt. "Lotho, how about you put your skills in imitating other people's writing to a better use than forging my signature on your atrocious school reports?"

Lotho blanched. "You know about that?"

"Are you asking me whether I believed the story of you losing your reports five years in a row and thus being unable to have me sign them for your teacher?" She gave him a hard look and Lotho shrank under her glare. "Please, I came up with better excuses for that when I was only ten years old."

Otho's head whirled around quick enough to give him whiplash. "Wha –"

Lobelia held up her hand. "Enough of that for now." She allowed herself to enjoy watching Lotho squirm under her gaze for a few more moments, before a slow grin spread over her lips. "Now how about we put your talents to a more profitable use?"


Naturally, there was no end to the talk in Hobbiton when after the reading of Bilbo Baggin's last will it became known that he had apparently excluded his entire extended family from his inheritance and instead left everything, including Bag End and the gold he had brought with him from his mysterious journey, to his most hated cousin and her husband, Lobelia and Otho Sackville-Baggins.

Wild guesses were made concerning Bilbo's reasons, most of them concluding that his adventuring must have taken a toll on his sanity after all. Other rumours were even stranger and more outlandish, and in every tavern and home in the Shire there was no topic that was more hotly discussed than the unexpected fortune that had been bestowed upon the Sackville-Bagginses.

For once, Lobelia enjoyed every minute of being the centre of attention, even though most of the gossip was hardly flattering. She even enjoyed the glares of the Gamgees as they moved all the Sackville-Bagginses' belongings up the Hill and into Bag End. That is, Lotho and Otho did the heavy lifting, while Lobelia watched and instructed them where to put everything, standing in Bilbo's front garden with her arms crossed and surveying everything with the sharp eye of a military commander.

She could feel the eyes of the Old Gaffer and his son Samwise boring into her back, but she did not even bother to turn around. The first thing she had done after moving into Bag End had been to release the Gamgees from their duty as the gardeners of Bag End, which caused an uproar in the Green Dragon the same night. Lobelia could not have insulted them worse if she had spread rumours about the Old Gaffer being a drunkard – and she as well as everyone else in Hobbiton was aware of that.

All in all, the Sackville-Bagginses' sudden fortune and move were mostly frowned upon, and when Lobelia wandered the streets of Hobbiton, there were few friendly faces and no greetings for her. But she did not care when the other adults turned away or went inside their houses when she approached or the children gave her a berth when they crossed paths with her. She had what she wanted.

She had Bag End.

She had enough gold to last her for the rest of her life.

And she had finally, finally managed to put one over on Bilbo.

Or so she thought.


It took them nearly half a year to clean out the mess Bilbo Baggins left behind. The entire place needed thorough reorganisation, but even though Lobelia would have liked nothing more than to just throw out all the papers and books Bilbo had possessed, she knew it would have been foolish to let the opportunity to discover all the secrets that Bilbo had kept so close to his chest go to waste.

Thus she instructed Lotho and Otho to sift through Bilbo's manuscripts with painstaking care, trying to glean valuable information for them (for example, where he had left the key to his secret cellar that was allegedly filled with gold from floor to ceiling, or the hiding places of other legendary treasure he had brought with him from his infamous adventures).

Unfortunately, Bilbo did not appear to be the type to write down hidden clues leading to where he had hidden his valuables, although he had certainly been airheaded enough to forget about them. After going through a greater part of the yarn Bilbo had spun – allegedly a written account of his adventures, though it seemed more likely that Bilbo had had more to drink than was good for him even more frequently than Lobelia had initially thought – Lobelia was convinced Bilbo must have been even madder than the worst rumours (most of which existed courtesy of herself) would have had it. The tales he had spun concerning goblins and stone giants and wolves and eagles were hair-raising, to say the least.

Lobelia was close to giving up and just throwing everything away, when something in Bilbo's tale caught her eye. He wrote of a strange encounter with a creature in a cave, and a magic ring he had won in a riddle contest.

Lobelia frowned and let the hand holding the manuscript sink. She was not one to readily believe in miracles and magical trinkets, but the less fantastic parts of Bilbo's accounts seemed reliable enough, especially when it came to the riches he had brought home from his travels. And now that she thought about it, there had been a few instances, mostly at family events, when Bilbo had suddenly and inexplicably vanished, seemingly into thin air …

Lobelia leafed through the pages again. The magic ring appeared time and time again, sometimes helping Bilbo to escape goblins, then to escape from the prisons of Elves, and after that to escape the gaze of a dragon – apparently, Bilbo had done a lot of escaping in his lifetime if his mad stories were to be believed.

"Otho, Lotho," Lobelia called out without taking her gaze from the paper. Only when she heard two pairs of stumbling steps did she look up to see to see the bedraggled forms of her son and husband standing in the door of the study, their eyes red-rimmed from weeks spent digging through all the papers and books and other clutter Bilbo had left behind.

"What?" Lotho asked, his voice gruff and snappish. His patience had been worn thin by hundreds of hours of fruitless searching.

Lobelia didn't heed his tone. "We have to look for a ring," she said.


Eventually, they found the ring.

As was typical for Bilbo, it was not kept in a locked chest or a jewellery box, but in the pocket of a jacket he had likely forgotten to pull on the night he vanished.

"It's big," Otho said. "How's it supposed to fit on a hobbit's finger?"

"It's dumb and boring," Lotho groused. "I bet it's just a brass curtain ring anyway. Look at it. It doesn't even have a jewel or something and as father said, it is way too big to fit on a finger."

Lobelia turned in her hand, held it up to her eye, scratched her fingernails over the spotless surface, and even bit down on it.

"Gold," she said.

"As if you'd know that from biting on it," Lotho said. "I'm leaving." He turned to leave.

Lobelia turned the ring some more, and even as she watched it seemed to shrink, and suddenly it seemed perfectly wearable for a hobbit hand. She put it on.

Otho stared.

"What?" Lobelia demanded.

Otho stared some more. His mouth moved like that of a fish out of water, and he raised a trembling finger to point at her. He made a high, whining noise, at which Lotho turned around once more.

Lotho gaped. His ruddy face was suddenly as pale as a sheet.

"What?" Lobelia demanded again.

Instead of answering, Lotho pointed behind her and said, "M-m-mirror."

Lobelia turned around.

It would be wrong to say that she did not see anything in the mirror. The vestibule, the bookshelf, and the old Baggins family portraits which they had not yet gotten around to taking down were all perfectly visible. What was missing and definitely should not have been, according to all common sense allotted to hobbits, was her.

Lobelia turned around, staring at her husband and then at her son and even though she would drop dead before she would admit it aloud, her mouth must have made the same gaping-fish motions as theirs in this moment.

She felt faint and suddenly quite cold. She fumbled for the ring and pulled it off her finger.

This seemed to be the last straw for Otho and Lotho. Already quite taxed by her vanishing into thin air her sudden reappearance caused both of them to drop to the floor in a dead faint.

After a moment of consideration, Lobelia did the same.


After the initial shock, their terror of the magic ring was quickly replaced by fascination. On the first evening, they passed it from hand to hand, each of them putting it on and pulling it off again giddily, delighting in the shouts of surprise from the others.

"Just imagine what we could do with this!" Lotho laughed. "I could sneak into Old Gaffer's house and rearrange things a bit, if you know what it mean – or I could pull out all their turnips in their stupid vegetable patch or – "

Lobelia laughed along with her husband and her son, but it soon became clear to her that both of them would make for very unreliable owners of the ring: Otho would just about lose his head if it wasn't attached to his shoulders, so entrusting the ring to him was out of the question; and Lotho would probably share it between himself and Tim Sandyman to chase after unsuspecting young hobbit-women, which was something not even Lobelia would condone, no matter how little she liked the Hobbitoners. Thus, on the next day, she announced in a tone that brooked no argument that she would keep it safe and, as she added, out of the hands of immature people who would most likely only use it for their own mean schemes and personal benefit.

Lotho looked mutinous, Otho less so, but in the end, the argument ended as every other argument in the Sackville-Baggins household: with Otho losing interest in the discussion, Lotho stomping off to fume somewhere else, and Lobelia sitting down to take a cup of tea with all the contentment due to the winner of the confrontation. She patted the ring which she kept in a pocket of her flowery apron.

"You're mine," she said. "Now don't you worry, I will keep their fingers off you. I won't let them use you for childish stuff and stupid endeavours. No, no, I will use you smartly and as you were meant to be used."

'Smartly, and as it was meant to be used' meant, of course, that Lobelia had, at last, the means to get back at the haughty inhabitants of Hobbiton, who had snubbed her ever since she had moved into Bag End. Thus Lobelia found herself suddenly out and about more than she had been in a long time, busy exacting her revenge on all those who had wronged her.

She pulled the clips from Linda Proudfoot's laundry so that half of it landed in the dirt, and the other half was blown all over the place and into sheep field down the road. She went to the market and when no one was looking, she tipped over the apple baskets of Roslinda Hornblower, picking up a few that rolled over the cobblestones and walked off without paying. She sometimes stopped to overhear others talk (often about herself) and made sure to play some mischief on them as well. Other days, she stood invisibly in the middle of the Green Dragon and she interjected nasty comments into ongoing conversations, which sometimes even caused a scuffle to break out.

All in all, the magic ring made her life a lot more interesting, and if you know Lobelia at least a little bit by now, you will already suspect that she did not tire of her magic ring even after years. She kept using it freely and frequently, and if anything, she only became more attached to it as time progressed.

Now there was an old Hobbit saying that every mischief ultimately and inevitably will have its pay-back. And although it didn't appear that this saying would come true for Lobelia any time soon (for the villagers still complained about ill luck, vanished family heirlooms, and bad rumours, and lamented how the mysterious incidents did not decline in viciousness or frequency) the day of consequence was soon to come.

Lobelia herself would have waved the warning off with an air of great superiority if you had told her. What retribution did she have to fear? She had a magic ring, and although she was more ill-liked than ever, nobody had proof that she was behind it, although the nastiness of most incidents and the pettiness of some rumours certainly carried her signature.

She would have told you that she knew what she was doing; and what business of yours was it anyway to put your nose into her affairs?

Alas, even though Lobelia would have been right about being above persecution under most circumstances and even though she was a smart hobbit-woman, she was not smart enough to suspect that a magic ring would call down greater trouble upon her head than angry hobbits. She was neither clever nor far-sighted enough to suspect that a mysterious ring that Bilbo had won from a mysterious creature might not have waited to come to her, but rather belong to someone else; someone who had sent even stranger and even more dangerous creatures to look for it.

Thus, the Sackville-Bagginses were completely unsuspecting when on a warm September evening in the year 1392 by Shire-reckoning, a heavy thump came on their front door.

Lobelia, who had been sitting in an armchair by the fire, looked up. Otho was snoring in a second armchair opposite her, unaware of the knock, and Lotho was nowhere to be seen. She frowned. Nobody ever came to visit the Sackville-Bagginses, safe for the hobbit-boy who brought the mail and never went further than the mailbox at the gate. Besides, she thought with a frown at the ticking brass clock on the desk by the window, it was nearing midnight on a workday – an hour when no respectable folk were out and about any longer.

This late, a knock at the door meant most likely a rascal trying to play a prank – or an urgent message or a visit by the bailiff. None of these options were particularly pleasant, but when a second knock came and nearly blasted the door from its hinges, Lobelia jumped to her feet.

"Oi!" she shouted. "Leave my door alone! If I find any scratch or splintered wood, I'll make you pay for the new planks and the varnish!" She grabbed the iron poker from its hook by the wall next to the chimney and took it with her, ready to give whoever was standing at the door a piece of her mind and, if necessary, a whack over the head to go with it.

She grabbed the doorknob, and pulled the door open – and nearly dropped her poker.

Standing not two feet in front of her was a … was a … a thing – a thing so big and dark that it seemed to blot out the entire night sky. It was wrapped in black cloth from head to toe, with no visible face, and when it talked, the marrow nearly froze in her bones.

"Sssshiiiire. Bagginssssss," it said.

Oh.

Oh.

That.

Was so.

Typical.

And with those two words, all of Lobelia's fear evaporated in the face of righteous fury caused by the impossible company Bilbo undoubtedly used to keep and had the cheek to drag to her front door even posthumously. She should have known that he was behind this.

"Baggins? Baggins?" she repeated. "There are no Bagginses in Bag End! The last one to live here has died nearly five years ago, and good riddance I say!" She did not care if the Old Gaffer could hear everything from where he was doubtlessly listening in near the fence between their gardens.

"A never-do-well he was, acting suspiciously and all in all completely inappropriate for a good hobbit!" Lobelia's voice grew louder and she brandished her poker. "Vanishing all of sudden not once but twice and telling nobody about it, keeping his riches to himself and taking the fun out on his family, not to mention flouncing off with Dwarves and a wizard and Bandobras knows who else – and just look at you! What are you, even? Where did he pick you up?" She waved her poker in the direction of the thing. "I have no idea who you are and what you want, but you are on my property in the middle of the night, asking for a good-for-nothing who hasn't lived here in half a decade, no doubt in a completely disreputable matter judging by your looks, and I will have you know that if you do not tell me a good reason for that right away, I will personally chase you down the Hill and into the Water!"

Lobelia gasped for air and brandished the poker again for good measure in what she guessed was the approximate direction of the thing's face.

"Sssshire. Bagginssss," it repeated.

"Are you deaf?" Lobelia cried. "There are no Bagginses here in Bag End! There is a single Baggins living in Brandy Hall, but he's more Brandybuck than anything else and I doubt that he's ever set foot into Hobbiton!"

The thing was silent. If Lobelia was any judge, considering it did not have a recognisable face, it seemed nonplussed.

"There isssss no Bagginssss here?" the thing asked.

Lobelia nearly lost her temper. "What did I just say? " she screeched. "Now, get out of my front garden!"

It was in this moment that Otho finally chose to appear and maybe even take up his duties as a husband when his wife was clearly being harassed by a nightly visitor.

"I heard you shouting, Lobelia, what – " Otho stepped into the doorway, caught sight of the creature, and fell silent. All of his blood left his face. "What in the name of –"

The thing perked up, as if Otho's arrival had filled it with new hope to get the information it wanted. "Bagginssss?"

Otho's reply consisted of fainting where he stood and landing in an undignified heap on the floor.

Lobelia resisted the urge to tear her hair out. She could already feel it coming loose from her bun. "Now look what you have done! That's enough, that is enough ! Out,out!" She lifted the poker with both hands, ready to slam it wherever it hurt most – surely even black-cloaked strangers had their weak spots.

Her blow was intercepted when all of a sudden a huge hand in black-scaled iron closed itself around her wrist, as cold and as relentless as death itself. All of her breath left her when the thing pulled her arm up further, further, further, until she was standing on her tiptoes and she felt like her shoulder might be pulled out of her socket.

"Ah! Let me go!"

The thing ignored her and instead pried open her fingers one by one, until her poker fell from her hands, followed by – when had she taken it out of her pocket? – the gold ring that had once belonged to Bilbo.

The ring landed on the doorstep with a thump whose sound made it seem like it weighed five stone.

Both Lobelia and the thing looked at it, then Lobelia tried to kick at the knee of the creature that had to been hidden under his dark cloak.

"Let me go! How dare you treat me like this! I will report you to the bailiff for that! They will lock you up in the cell under the town hall in Michel-Delving!" she screeched. "And don't you dare take that ring, it is mine! I did not steal it, it was already here when I moved here, it was bequeathed to me along with everything else that is here in Bag End!"

"Be sssssssilent."

Lobelia's mouth snapped shut as if somebody had punched her jaw from below.

The thing still stared at the ring. It also still had not let go of her arm. It seemed to ponder something, then it apparently came to a decision, because it let Lobelia go.

She stumbled backwards, breathing heavily. Her hair was falling loose around her face. "You – you!" she snarled, but her voice did not sound as firm as she would have liked. She had to stare at those hands with those gauntlets that reminded her of dragon-scales although she had never even seen a dragon –

"Pick up the Ring."

The voice was like ice and the screech of nails on a chalkboard, and Lobelia pressed her hands to her skull, but to no avail.

"Take the Ring."

"How dare you?" she cried. "How dare you come here, asking for Bagginses in the middle of the night, and asking for my ring – "

"We were not asssking." And with a motion as fluid as water the creature drew a sword from beneath its cloak and levelled the horrible blade at Lobelia's nose.

"Now pick up the Ring and get on the horssse."

"What are you talking about, what hor –"

The words died in her throat when she looked past the creature for the first time. Right there, standing on the road directly where the delivery boy used to shove her mail into the mailbox, stood a horse bigger than any pony she had ever seen. It was as black as a new moon's night, maybe even more so, as there was no light reflecting off its coat. It was stomping restlessly, its mane strangely clotted, its mouth foaming. Its eyes were red.

"What in the name of Bandobras Took ist this?" she said, her voice faint. She gazed up at the hooded figure again, truly looking at it for the first time since she had opened the door. The sword, the chainmail-gauntlets, the black void under its hood where a face was supposed to be…

"Who are you?"

"We are the onesss that have come for you," the hooded creature hissed – and now she could see more shadows moving in the deeper darkness down the hill, three, four, five ghostly forms of lightless void shifting soundlessly in the night! – and then took another step forward until it filled her entire doorway. Its sword was very close to her chest. "And you will come with usss."

Oh dear.