You've Got Another Thing Coming

I squealed as I felt something graze my arm. It was sharp and cold and I realised that it had just been a stone or something protruding from the cave wall.
Rose hushed me and gave me a shove in the back. She had been doing so for the last half hour. It was very clear that she was uncomfortable, if not plain scared, down in the thickest of darkness where I couldn’t see my finger even if I’d poke my own eye with it.

I stumbled forward, trying to make my eyes adjust to the blackness and maybe actually see the next thing I was going to trip over.
I did not.
I stepped right into a small pit, which made me fall very ungracefully to the ground and release an ear shattering ‘humphf’.

Okay, so the noise I made wasn’t exactly ear shattering. Though, the sound Cherokee made as I grabbed a hold of his ankles as I fell (he was walking in front, leading the way) was practically deafening.

It wasn’t a very high yell, not exactly un-manly, but as the noise ricochet off the cold stone walls and echoed throughout the thin passage it magnified into unbelievable proportions and basically scared the crap out of all of us.

I lay, quivering on the ground, with my hands over my ears. I squinted through one of my shut eyelids to see nothing but blackness.

“Cherokee?” I called out tentatively. “Are you okay?”

There was no answer. I figured it might be because he’d be damned right pissed at me right about now, so I brushed it off.

“Rose?” I continued, turning my head slightly backwards. “You all right?”

No answer there, either. By this point, I was actually becoming a bit frightened. I did not want another monster to creep up on me whenever I was without protector or fellow bait.
I opened my other eye, staring into the darkness without making out even as much as the contours of my nose.
I could have been blind for all the good it did me.

“Goddamnit!” I cried out in pure frustration. “Can’t anyone turn on the lights?!”

As soon as I said the words, the entire cave filled with a bright white light. I was temporarily blinded, but as soon as I could I peered up at the ceiling, and at the hundreds of fluorescent lamps that hung there.
I then glanced around me, at the red, moist cave walls that dripped with underground water, the jagged rocks that lay about and all the skeletons of small rodents that lined the edges of the floor.

I found everything I could have wanted to see in a creepy cave belonging to a creepy monster, except for the gold treasure and my two companions.

“Cherokee?” I whispered now, almost too afraid to speak. “Rose?”

However, no one was around to hear me.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When I was done with running around in circles and screaming my head off I sat down on one of the many rocks that littered on the ground. I was breathing heavily - like you do - and put my head in my hands and started doing what I love to do when there’s nothing else around: stare off into space.

I scratched my stubbly cheeks, enjoying the rasping noise as my nails raked through the rough hairs on my face. Absentmindedly I carried on with scratching my neck, my shoulders, my chest and arms and stomach before I realised I was, quite literally, inches away from behaving like a true man.

“Ew!” I recoiled, feeling more than a little bit disgusted with myself. “Ew, ew, ew!”

I stood up and started waltzing around, every so often muttering the word ‘manly’ and shuddering.

Without giving it too much thought my peculiar dance moves led me further down the cave. I rarely stopped, rarely considered my path as I practically jumped forward.
Sooner than what I would have expected, seeing as I was still in awe with my own naughty ways, I stumbled out into a wide open space.

It was a small clearing in a forest; I was surrounded by pine trees and wildly grown juniper bushes, and it was all covered in snow.
An old fashioned, tall lamp post spread its yellow light across the scene making everything glitter like gold.

I took one glance around me, then realised where the hell I was:

“Oh, come on!” I groaned in frustration. “What am I doing in freaking Narnia?”