You've Got Another Thing Coming

The wind rustled the branches of the trees and made the snow dribble down all around. I could do nothing but sigh, and with all the mental presence I had, dust off my memory to figure out where to go on from here.

And then it came to me:
“Mr. Tumnus!” I snapped my fingers as the information sank in.

How was I supposed to find a hairy, hoofed James McAvoy in the middle of a dream world? With my current luck I could have sworn Fate would do its utmost to have me stand around in the chilly evening light like a dribbling fool.

While I stood contemplating different ways of making the murder of Fate seem like an incidental suicide, suddenly someone spoke:
“Excuse me, mister?” a light, airy voice said with a soft Scottish accent.

I spun around and was faced by nothingness. I looked around the thin lamp post, but I could see nothing but trunks and bushes.

“Sir, up here”, someone said.

I threw my head back, staring up at the darkening evening sky. Nothingness.
The light voice cleared its throat and I quickly looked in the direction of the noise. Once again, the lamp post was in my way.

“Sir, could you please stop ignoring me? There is no one behind me.”

I let my eyes trail along the lamp. From the ground to the glass-framed top; and I stared in wonder.

“Wow!” I exhaled.

It was, of course, the lamp post who had spoken. It now stood slightly leaning over me, its yellow light giving everything a hue of divinity.

“Could I help you, sir?” it wondered politely, now that I had acknowledged its existence.

I stared. The lamp uncomfortably cleared its throat, and I almost snapped out of it.

“Err,” I said, being as sure with words as I was. “I need to go…somewhere.”

“Really?” the lamp responded kindly. “And where might this somewhere be?”

“Uhm,” I contemplated my words carefully. “I don’t know.”

The lamp peered at me peculiarly. “I see,” it said softly, its tone giving away the fact that it did not understand one bit. “But if you don’t know where to go, how are you going to get there?”

I felt my cheeks redden slightly and I averted my gaze. “My friends know where I have to go,” I confessed.

“Aha!” the lamp post sounded joyous. “It sounds like we are getting to the bottom of this! Now, where are your friends?”

I suddenly became very aware of the fact that I was talking to a strange lamp post, only the emphasis shouldn’t be on ‘lamp post’ as much as it should be on ‘strange’. I was standing around, making conversation with an alien, completely unknown thing. This thought made me instantly defensive and suspicious. Why would a lamp post care about a girl magically transformed into a guy who wanders out a hole in the ground only to start talking about hoofed satyrs?

I suppose my immediate change of attitude showed, because the lamp post leaned away slightly.

“I understand if you do not wish to share such information with a stranger like me,” it said, retreating on the personal level. “But if you are looking for two faerie siblings, one with an attitude problem and the other with the most beautiful smile known to man,” the lamp post sighed in adoration, “then I suggest you take that way.”

It leaned slightly to its right, indicating a broad path lightly dusted with powder snow.
I took in the idyll path, bright in the evening moon that started to rise above the tree tops.
I then looked over to its left, where darkness covered the path and the trunks were so close that they almost touched. The bushes looked sharp, bearing no needles and stretching their naked twigs toward the non-existing light. In my mind I could have sworn I heard a wolf howl from a distance.

Fine, I thought. At least I’m not going to make the same mistake as Maurice did in Beauty and the Beast.

“Thank you”, I managed to say out loud, bowing in front of the kind lamp post. “You’ve been very kind.”

“Not at all,” the lamp post answered calmly, politeness practically radiating off its form. “It has been a while since they passed, but I do believe their footprints will still show in the snow. But do hurry, so you can catch up with them. They seemed rather stressed, for some reason.”

I simply nodded, smiled and figured I might as well hug the thing. So I did.
It accepted my sign of affection with a surprised grunt, but before it had any time to respond I was well on my way.

My feet made their own marks in the light snow as I followed the two tracks on the bright path leading away from the clearing, and just before I was to turn a corner that would have made me lose sight of the lamp post, I distinctively heard a sincere:

“Good luck, young fellow! Good luck!”