Is it real or is it a shared reflexive manifestation of the subconscious, an endless battleground of Eros and Thanatos, do you think?

Excuse me.

The man left them there. An old word came to him. Clochards. It meant, vagrants. He walked away from them, under awnings, stepping in puddles, and soon he was lost from sight.

The clochard, whose name was Mathieu, looked after him and shook his head. He took out a can of paint and pointed the nozzle carefully and sprayed the wall with a message that was replicated elsewhere, on other walls, in other parts of the city. Then he put the can away and took a swig from his bottle and smiled, and he and the others left there and went through the shadows and into the cracks between the stones of the world, and then they were gone from there and to that other place.

They sat on top of a cliff that, from a distance, looked like an exclamation mark. Mathieu drank from the bottle and passed it to Esther and she in turn passed it to Mikhel, and so on. Their numbers never stayed exactly the same. The clochards never worked, only travelled, and they begged when there was begging to be had and they stole, if there was anything worth stealing. As they moved across the Escapement their numbers sometimes swelled and sometimes dwindled. They were driven only by the desire to keep on moving, and by their need for substance or Sticks.

They were currently out there in the Doinklands. A ghost road glowed white and pale in the distance, snaking across the plains. Mathieu took another glug from the bottle, passed it round again. They’d scored substance a few days’ hike away in Kellysburg. They’d made their way from there across the plains and to the low mountains, though it seemed to Mathieu that they’d spent a part of the way traversing a city in that other place, dodging cars and taking shelter in abandoned buildings or under bridges.

The two places got mixed up in his mind more often than not. It was hard to keep track of what was where, and when. Clocks exploded into birds, shadow battled stone, lizards shed their skin and scuttled on the sands with rattling bones. Now the clochards sat on the big rocks and drank just enough so that the world thinned around them and from time to time, beyond the dark, he could see the glaring lights of shops from that other place. They were sitting like that, quite comfortably, when they saw the approaching storm.