Chapter 21: Empty Waters
The Dead Marshes, or so Gollum (or Smegol, as Frodo preferred I call him) says they're called, was about the most depressing thing I had ever seen. Gollum (I believe that the One deserves that name after all it had done, even if it was just the Ring side of Gollum) explained that ever since the Great War the elves, men, dwarves, and orcs slept in the waters. "Don't follow the lights," Gollum warned. "Or hobbits go down to join the dead people and light little candles of their own." He sneered at me. I hated the Ring.
In the dark, mossy-green water, placid faces, like bobbing eye-balls with the mysterious, floating torches shining on them, shone with an eerie glow through the murk. All were dead, eyes glued shut. Their skeleton-like heads made a tremble creep down to my tailbone, and my throat closed up, tight. Something about the people in the fog made a terrifying adrenaline slide through my veins. My eyes flickered from one head to the next as if I was being watched by them, and I knew that any moment I would catch one with piercing red eyes, staring into my very soul.
What I got was much worse. To my left, hovering inches below the surface of the gritty water was a man and a woman, hands clasped together with their weak, pale fingers intertwined. The lady's wavy, long, blonde hair floated around her head like a silver spider web, her face gashed with white scars across her cheeks as if she had been sliced with many knives. I knew in an instant that it was Eowyn. She was exactly as I saw her as a child, but the man at her side was even more shocking to see in the midst of the water. He was particularly short-far shorter than Eowyn-and stocky, for that matter. His pudgy stomach stuck out of his bloodstained armor a bit. Fresh blood was still trickling down his arm and out of a rather large hole in his chest. In his left hand he still clutched a bloodstained blade. Long, blonde, shaggy ringlets cascaded around his strong face which was battered, and in one spot there was a massive, pink scar above his right eyebrow. His eyelashes rested against his shallow cheekbones. I jolted when I saw the hobbit's pained frown, and I felt like the light of my life had gone out with a snap. I fell to my knees, uselessly in tears, and whispered, "No...Merry..."
Just then a terrific splash sounded behind me. I whiplashed my head toward the sound. One of the glistening pools off to the right side of the path had white bubbles frothing in it as the unsettled surface bobbed from an impact. My stomach clenched up in a knot. "FRODO!" I yelled shrilly. I scrambled to the edge, tripping over my own feet in the process, but before I could even strip off my elven cloak, Gollum dived headlong in after him. "No!" I screeched at him. He'd gone to retrieve the Ring.
I kicked at the mud along the path and cursed. "Why do you have to be so selfish?! He's going to kill him, and it's going to be all my fault! Stupid Ring!" I screamed at no one in particular as my fingernails dug into the soft, sensitive skin on my inner thighs. "You win, Sauron. You've taken everything away that's important to me! WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT!" I wailed and sank to my knees in tears.
The surface of the water bubbled, and Gollum emerged, dragging Frodo by the points of his ears. Frodo sputtered water from his lungs as he struggled to get his body out of contact with the glowing water.
"Frodo!" I gasped, and in my relief, I flung myself to his side, grasped him by his checkered suspenders, and nuzzled my face into his wet neck. "Frodo, Frodo," I whispered as if saying his name was a comfort that went through me, never satisfying enough to say it once. "Oh my dear, Frodo. Now it's you that has almost drowned." I laughed in stressed hysterics.
After a moment, I pulled back to look at his eyes, but they were looking past me, through me. I didn't exist anymore. "Gollum?.." he uttered distantly. He could not feel anything anymore, and I knew it. Not even my throbbing love for him that I finally had the courage to show him after so many long years of running away from him in fright. My heart ached for him to come back from his misery and woe to let me show him that nothing will happen to him, whilst I am here with him and that I will shield him forever and let the Ring hurt him no longer, but he will never come back; there is no coming back for Frodo of the Shire, at all, not even when it's all over and done. So if Frodo will never come back, then I'm not coming back either.
My eyes drifted down to my hands clasped between my knees. Dread filled my heart-like a leaky bucket with stale, rancid water oozing out of a mold-rotted hole in the bottom of it-as I rocked myself to my feet, leaving him to his confusion, and turned toward the road on. My head flopped with each step, and I wiped a warm tear that was clinging to the middle of my eyelashes for life. I didn't care anymore. Seeing Frodo like this was worse than what I saw in the mirror. I couldn't bear it.
When I staggered past the pool that Merry and Eyown were drifting in, I turned to take one last peak at Merry before I ventured out into the unknown, never to return. I just wanted to see my brother's face one last time. The problem was that when I glanced into the pool again, it was empty. Merry and Eyown were gone...