The decaying portico loomed over me, somehow unwelcoming yet designed to admit or perhaps entrap. I had previously abandoned all hope so that proviso was left unsaid. Pushing open the doors, I ventured into the unknown.

Daylight seemed to shrivel away as I walked into the entrance hall, giving way to a gloom that was disquieting. Carved figures populated the balustrades, glaring balefully down upon the hesitant visitor. I was still holding the old man in a painful embrace and I was determined to dispose of him somewhere soon.

It felt like I had come home but I was unsure of where home was. Surely this ramshackle mansion was not the ultimate destination of my existential meandering? A chill draught from the inner reaches of the grand hall rippled across my skin and elevated the hairs on my neck. It was like a breath from the past.

I imagined that I stood at the edge of time, hunted to extinction in the earth’s nascent light. All around me on the walls of the cave the shadows of my ancestors danced, silhouetted by fire. Outside in the awful night winged horrors flapped and shrieked, forever free in time but bound by flesh.

I picked up the old man and carried him towards higher ground. He was light in my arms, as though his corporeal state was dissolving with the wind blown sand. The shoreline stretched to infinity, punctuated by headstones of rock that gazed out to sea. Above all, the turgid sky swirled and heaved like the ocean below.

I found some steps that wandered up through the dripping stone. A turreted roof appeared through the fog, hunched over the headland and I supposed that this building was the destination of the steps. A feeling of déjà vu surged through me like a wave of nausea. Fragments of memory crystallized in my mind.

I climber higher up the slippery stairs and the old edifice reared up before me. It seemed to be a kind of gothic palace decaying in the briny mist, bristling with spires and crumbling into the black cliffs that leered over it. Attraction and repulsion held hands in my heart.

Whatever awaited me there was a relic of another time, an anachronism that had snapped its chains and overthrown the past. Each step dragged me closer to the kiss of destiny, a date with dissolution and despair. But where the hell was I?

The beach was the nexus between the sky, ocean and earth, a ribbon of sand with a skirt of waves. Two people walked along it, one supporting the other like a father and child, or perhaps a son with his aged father. The wind scratched their skin and the sea murmured ceaselessly.

The woman had abandoned them, unconcerned now that the migratory cycle was ending, or beginning. A creature of instinct and change, she flew to find the flock, the last of her kind gliding in the vaults of the sky or sleeping in the barren nest below. The raging sky bubbled and heaved, sluicing rain along the rocky coast.

Where were they? He couldn’t work it out and looked across the sea to find an answer. In the misty distance he could make out the spires and turrets of a lost city. Somewhere deep inside he recalled this memory but he realized that it might not have happened to him yet. He was lost in time.

Now he sat naked on the sand watching lost souls struggling in the currents of existence, only just managing to keep their heads above water. Gulls cried and the waves whispered that he should come and join them but he demurred. In an imperfect world this would have to do.

Instinct drew us towards our destination as the incipient winter blew on our necks. Except there was no us to speak of, as she flew high above the muck of earth and even the old man had sloughed off his skin, becoming at one with nothing. I rejoiced in nothing too, feeble in the face of daily adversity, a rabbit in time’s headlights.

The road uncurled like a serpent, enticing and fearsome, a lifeline to what was left of the future, that half finished masterpiece of intent. We thundered on, picking up speed in the never ending dawn, crazy horses panicked by the wind. She smelt the sea and surged ahead.

He and I, plodding dogs of the past panted and dripped. There was nowhere left to go but forward, like this mad narrative, chaotic and unabridged. The coast was somewhere up ahead, a wasteland of salty sputum and crashing hopes.

In the dying day, the stragglers limped towards the light but found themselves on a dismal headland, overlooking all that lay before. The boiling mass of cloud grumbled over and the wind shrieked invective at the waves. And in the distance the wretched inn appeared and disappeared.

The transformation began sooner than I expected in the snarling city of chaos. The anthropomorphically altered residents filled the streets seeking to drink the milk of human kindness and grow strong from it. We laid low in darkened rooms yet the very air infected us and gave us cause to change.

She had always been a creature of the air and her transmogrification was subtle, blue feathers shivering in the dawn light. We kept our eyes averted from her, less her hunger take another form. We had other things to worry about.

The old man visibly sagged, as though his skin was just a bag for his bones. His animus was quite unappealing given form in the bleached light of day. I could only hope that my own alteration was more aesthetically pleasing but it wasn’t to be. Somewhat less than human I let out a howl of dismay, disappointed that I had grown older but no wiser.

In a dusty hovel in the mad metropolis we fought like cats and dogs and whatever. Discontent brewed deep in our hearts and anger spilled over onto the pavement. We were no better or worse than the others now and similarity breeds contempt and indifference. Shunned and mocked, it was time for us to leave with our tails between our legs.

My dream was coming to an end. I’d been wrestling with my desperate self all night, wrapped in my sheet like a winding cloth. I no longer cared about anything but I did of course, worried about the family that I never had. Logic never entered into the equation-no wonder nothing ever added up.

The moment passed as they all do. He or I was back in our cage, a dark corner within a messy dream filled with heartache and hobgoblins. Trapped in a musty tenement, we filled the stale hours with self reflection and little else. Like hostages to our own nature, we whiled away the day like it was our last.

It didn’t take long for the façade of good behaviour to shatter in the city of dogs. When all seek to be top dogs then will the baying hounds run amok through gentle folk. We three unlikely amigos had to take shelter from the snapping pack that menaced our presence.

In the freezing morning, we left the desert and rattled through a hinterland of low thorn bushes and twisted trees. Devoid of people, the landscape presupposed a return to an earlier period of evolution when survival was the only game in town. My companions slept.

I was stuck with myself. By the time we escaped the time zombies I’d worked out that the decrepit old man was me, warts and all. This young witch who goaded us to go faster was somehow the catalyst to a cataclysm of time. There is only just enough time to go around. Somehow she had bypassed this idea and dragged us with her. The contradictory problem sat slumped against me, snoring and drooled on my shoulder.