I listened to the wall during the long night, trying to put a face to the cries for help. Sleep was a fugitive son in my life, absconding over the wall between us. The voice in the next room babbled incessantly, repetitively and incoherently. Each time I drifted off, his ranting would jerk me awake like a fish hook in my mind. I remember splashing along a creek almost asleep, and the wall called me back.

In the half light I began to notice that the cracked plaster was swelling outwards, although it may have been an enlargement of my imagination. His muttering felt closer all the time, like white ants chewing through the woodwork and his unshaven face was pressing at my consciousness, leaning into existence on my side of the fence.

It occurred to me that I might be in an old folk’s home, the penultimate room before the infirmary. It was bound to happen at some stage so perhaps it would be good to get it over with. I curled up into a ball as the faces and hands clutched at me from the other side.

Night was more than the absence of day, like a rough blanket around my shoulders. I was tired of me but there was no one else. My last thought before sleep seized me was that I was that lunatic in the next room and he was me.

My ancestors lay entombed in the bed with me, their empty eye sockets staring at the ceiling. When I could stand it no longer I roused myself and struggled into the present. The weak light of a dying sun trickled into the room, enlightening the furniture but not the occupant.

I seized the moment and looked out of the window. The outside was an extension of the inside, a shared space for the absurdity that had enfolded me. The institutional stones of the building held me with their cold fingers, both protected from myself and incarcerated against my will. I had done nothing to deserve this and in fact I had done nothing at all.

Where had I dragged my body to now? A smell of the sea blew in through the cracks in my reality. The bones of the structure creaked and groaned with decrepitude and sadness. I closed my eyes but that didn’t prevent me from seeing the ragged future beyond the window.

Toothy waves reared up and crashed on the boardwalk, then retreated, clutching at the rock. The sky filled with tears. I had returned to a place that I had never known, nor had ever really abandoned. As the darkness enclosed me I heard the rustling sounds of the night and the beating of my frail heart.

So where was I really? As far as I could tell I had either checked into a jail or a motel but the similarity was confusing. To make things worse, the hacking cough in the room next to mine could signify a hospital scenario. I was too anxious to try the door, in case it opened.

My only company was the television with its endless repeats, B grade conversation and gruesome war zone reportage. Everything seemed normal on the surface as the fridge chuckled and the air conditioner gasped and choked. But just below my level of awareness, the entire room seethed and bubbled with paranormal activity.

The racking coughs were sounding more like the growling of a great dog. The motorway next door breathed in and out. I worried that the TV was becoming bored with me and I desperately tried to keep up a conversational flow but I was not its equal. Bed was my refuge and final resting place.

I lay at an impossible angle, a life half lived and awash with wretched thoughts. I believed that I stood in the bathroom yet I was never a believer. How could I be in the bed and elsewhere too? Nothing made sense again.

It was like being home. My brothers and sisters crowded around in the nest, welcoming the prodigal slug. All my wandering and wondering had brought me to this dangerous and safe place, a hair’s breadth from catastrophe.

I felt like a cuckoo, placed with a family under false pretence, not knowing how to respond to kindness. However I was comforted and warm, surrounded by downy love, high above the madness of mankind. All I need do was preen myself and look at the view.

The surrounding clouds began to shape themselves into bulbous faces, full of wrath and rain. I squeezed my eyes tighter, fearing that my halcyon days were over and this experience was just an illuminated fragment from my own twisted mythology. The mountains melted.

I was lying in a bed of crumpled dreams, desperately hanging onto the memory of a memory. Cruel truth had emptied the love nest. I had to begin the story again but I couldn’t put my feelings into words.

I was lifted high above the menial world. I imagined myself to be a magnificent specimen, plucked out of obscurity to shine from above. I was being relocated, remodeled and renovated, proudly brought to you on the wings of an angel.

My reincarnation was improbable. The maggot oozes and moves on. There is nothing to tell of this time except the passing of it. I reclined all day, chewing up the precious seconds of a limited eternity.

I lay curled up in the womb of my room. My protective layers had been shredded in readiness for the gift of death and when it happened I felt no different. I was but a shadow on a rock, a sacrifice for the sun, fading into the background.

I was dismembered by the black dog during the night. My limbs were rearranged as I slept, then disposed of accordingly in the dawn’s early light. My mind was the last to go, each neuron clinging on for dear life.

The pack had found me. When black dog and I fled the cage the other inmates tracked us through the dire city and the madness of the black desert. Now they surrounded me baying for blood and it was hard to tell which was who and who was which. We all looked the same, outcasts from our kind, a sub-species of a sub-species.