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Bradford was a fool. I tried to warn him; transcendental meditation is a predatory cult interested in only one thing – his wealth. There are so many other methods of meditation he might try that wouldn’t get him into any more hot water. He shot me down with a weird warm lie of a smile drawn across his face like a cultist bought and sold.

“My friend, it has nothing to do with transcendental meditation. While I do indeed transcend, I don’t go to oneness. I go somewhere far more prosperous. The inky black. The absolute zero. A place of wonder and nothingness. I go to the void”.

That was the jist of my last in-person interaction with the man, last February. Our bi-monthly visits had begun to be pushed off, for this or that, sporadically for around a year at that time, and in the coming months, sightings of the man dried up completely. It was only this November, nine months since our last meet and six since there was any response from him at all that I refused any further excuse. Now I understand that life is no linear path, and sometimes to progress you must inevitably diverge from others you would otherwise cling to. But this was the Christmas meet. A get together we hadn’t missed in twenty three years. I was firm but fair in my correspondence. No visits to the ruins of Babylon or digs in Egyptian sand would stand as a valid excuse this time. In all truthfulness I missed my friend, and I tried to infer that fact gently in the email. I understood that his strange and secretive dealings were no concern of mine, but I was still concerned for him. I had known the man all my life, and we shared everything until recently. Perhaps he had tried to share his hobbies with me but I’d shot him down in ignorance? This meditation thing he was involved in… Maybe I was too quick to judge… Oh get a grip before you embarrass yourself.

His RSVP was eerily swift and came the next day in the form of a pen-written letter of very poor hand. Wherever in the world I may have thought he was, he clearly hadn’t gone very far at all. I felt it appropriate at the time to bury the strange situation deep down and chose to focus solely on seeing my friend again. His response was eerie considering the year he’d spent avoiding me. Here it is in part –

My dear friend. My heart jumps upon hearing from you again. Gods bless you for keeping me close to your thoughts all this time when so many others have tossed me to the wind. I would very much like to see you, if only for one eve, and I offer you my heartfelt apologies for other engagements that have pulled me away from our kinship. I do not lie to you when I say things have gone terribly awry this past year. Barbara left and took Charlie with her because of all this mess I’m in. I don’t know where they are and that is for the best, though I miss them as terribly as I miss you. I would do anything in this moment to spend some time with you. I will see you next month, the night before Christmas, 6pm as always.

Regards,

Bradford.

PS please do not inform my parents of this message or our get together. They have been seeking me like vultures and I refuse to give them the satisfaction.

I decided not to respond to this alarming letter. I was speechless if I’m honest. I stuffed it in a desk drawer and left the cards in Bradford’s hands assuming and almost hoping the man would blow me off again. November and December rolled on by and I did all I could to muster some festive spirit. I prepared the usual – Bourbon for myself, a fine Port for my friend, a small array of finger foods, mince pies and some light holiday music.

By 5pm Christmas Eve, I found myself staring out of the window watching the drive being peppered with snow. A wave of anxiety was tearing through me. I’m not sure why. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, maybe I was excited. Maybe I was nervous. Whatever the case, I took in a couple of whisky sours and a few cigarettes to calm down. The nagging thoughts were still there though. The strange absence. The even stranger letter. I hope he flakes. Something tells me it’s for the best.

6pm came and went. So did 7. By 8:30 I had begun to relax again, and by 9 I was dozing off from I don’t know how much whisky.

At 9:18, I awoke sweat-glazed  from a very strange dream. A grotesque situation it was, letting a rat of some girth feast upon my hand, gnawing at the flesh between my fingers whilst singing Jingle Bell rock between mouthfuls in Bradford’s voice. While it is true that jingle bell rock was playing on the stereo, the rat was actually my burned down cigarette, and its biting was my searing flesh. I jumped up with a start and ran over to the sink to cool my singeing skin cursing my own idiocy. You twat. You could have burned the whole fucking place down.

Self chastising took the back seat though, when I heard that single and loud thunk at the door. In my painful stupor I thought maybe a neighbour had heard my ruckus. I ran over to the door in my half-drunk half-asleep haze, not really thinking, and pulled it open, letting out a gasp of fright at the sight before me. That thing stood there on my porch on that snowy Christmas night.

Catching myself in my faux Pas, I feigned excitement at its arrival. I tentatively invited it in and plopped it down on its usual favourite wing-back chesterfield; the shagreen one. The fireplace lit its face in a ghastly manor, catching all the new creases and cavities in its face. This WAS Bradford. I could see it. Though it looked like he’d just lived forty years in ten months. The man was 35 as am I, but now looked so decrepit and shrunken, I’d mistake him for a geriatric if I didn’t partly recognise that face in there, now sallow, now gaunt.

He apologised for his tardiness and gave some reason I don’t remember. I don’t remember much of what he said for those first few moments. What had happened to this man?! My friend! My feelings of horror settled as we sat, backing off for feelings of concern and sympathy. Was he sick? Should I ask? Two friends who were once so close now had a cavern wrought between them. It felt rude to pry.

We kept the chat light and reminiscent, avoiding the elephant in the room. Bradford was dressed in his usual splendour – tailored Spitalfields tweed – his signature. Only these beautiful well fitted pieces he’d cared for for so long still held his original shape so now they resembled a loose pantomime costume drowning his tiny boney frame. All this talk of the past couldn’t stave off this debilitating situation for long. I’d noticed, after forty minutes of chit-chat, somewhere around there, that he hadn’t touched his port or any of the nibbles. I forgot myself, diving into a quip at his expense.

“Why you’ve not touched your port old boy! This is very uncharacteristic of you and I fear your reputation may be at stake! Have you fallen ill?! A man without his signature nectar on Christmas of all things!”

His sunken eyes hit the floor. In a deep sadness of reality, I suppose. He replied.

“I dare not. I am sorry.”

Well that’s it then, I thought. In for a penny I suppose, the ice is broken now. I began to probe.

“You dare not? What is wrong man?”

He sat back, staring into the fire, gathering his thoughts.

“While I appreciate your sensitivity my friend, I don’t sit here in ignorance, pretending you don’t see the mangled monstrosity sitting before you. I’ve made some terrible mistakes in my life, many of which you have been party-to. But no mistake has been nearly as dire as this one. My only solace is that you kept away from it all.” He looked down at himself, his ill-fitting clothing.

“Well, are you sick?” I asked, “Did you catch some dreadful affliction on your travels?”

“Travels,” he sniggered to himself. “My travels. While it is true that I went gallivanting around the globe searching for ancient mysticism, all there is to be found out there is sand and rock. No, it fits with strange irony that I should search for hidden knowledge all over the world but that I should actually find it right here in Suffolk. Just down the road in fact. And that it should be a power so potent that I am filled with terror and dread beyond escape. Beyond reckoning even.”

“Tell me,” I demanded. “You came here tonight for a reason, I can tell. Let me try to help you.”

“Oh there is no help from this,” he jabbed. He halted for a moment, his cataract gaze caught back into the flames dancing in the fireplace. Considering his next move. His cloudy eyes met mine and he began.

“Do you remember what we did last November?” He asked.

“Of course I do. It was your father’s wedding.”

“My father’s wedding. A sordid affair.”

Sordid was right. This was his father’s third marriage and the 58 year-old man was marrying a 17 year-old child in a narrative line straight out of Lolita. Bradford was supposed to have been the designated driver for the rest of his siblings that night, but things became so disconcerting and uncomfortable that the majority of us chose to drain the free bar rather than put up with the ridiculous charade any longer.

“I walked home alone that night,” he continued. “You passed out in a closet, my brothers were fighting, my father was sticking his tongue into the mouth of a child so I didn’t mind it. I wanted to get out of that place. That sickening show they put on. We’ve walked that road together how many times? Hundreds? So to do it in the snow at night was no big deal. The icy cold would help to sober me up anyway. So off I went – coat, brolly, torch, into the night wanting nothing but my bed and the day to be over.”

He looked down in this moment, at his drink on the side table, as if he was longing desperately to taste it. He caught me watching and continued.

“Do you remember Sibling Bridge?” He asked.

“Of course, the one on the road just outside Barthelham estate.”

“Do you know why it is called Sibling Bridge?”

“Nobody does,” I said. “It’s been called that forever and nobody really knows why.”

“I know why,” he spat, his eyes lighting ablaze, a reflection of the fire between us.

“That night I came to the bridge in the heavy snow. Through the fog of flakes I thought I saw a shape up on one of its sides. As I came closer, the shape took the form of a boy. He must have been about eleven or twelve. He was half-naked in the snowstorm, standing on the balustrade, arms outstretched towards either end of the bridge. I ran over and grabbed him, fearing the worst, and pulled him down to safety, wrapping my coat around him. He was absolutely freezing. Skin pale as the snow but sickly looking too, like a duck-egg grey. ‘It’s going to be ok’ were the only words that came out of me. The boy stood still, face buried inside my coat. I had to do something. I knelt down to the boy’s level, sheltering us with my umbrella and tried to talk with him. I asked him why he was out here so late with no shirt on and he didn’t reply. Kept his head down. I lifted his chin up – I was trying to show him I was just here to help but he had his eyes closed tight. I asked him his name and saw his lips move slightly but I couldn’t hear the words. I asked again and he did the same thing. I leant my ear to his mouth and asked a third time. ‘What is your name, son?’

‘Forsake thine light’, he said. His answer sent a shiver down my spine. Quite peculiar. I drew my head back to look at him and his eyes were now open. Only… there were no eyes. Just empty black sockets. Startled the hell out of me and my gut was already in my throat. I lost my balance in shock and fell back there on the cold ground. He screamed out at me, arms flinging outwards again, backing up towards the edge of the bridge. I scrambled to my feet but it was too late. He went over the edge.”

I couldn’t believe what Bradford was saying. A shirtless boy in a snowstorm without eyes jumping off of Sibling bridge. Preposterous. I asked him what he did next and he said he called the police that night but they never found anything. The bridge crosses a rocky ravine 60 ft deep with the Stowburn river below. The river meets the sea three miles away, so any evidence of a suicide attempt would’ve been difficult to find, coupled with the fact that there have been no missing persons cases in the area for years. I asked him why he had never told me about all this before.

“Because that wasn’t the last time I encountered Mad Shadow,” he said.

“At first he’d come to me in my dreams. Staring at me in the night through those eyeless sockets, those dark pits of nothingness that follow my every move as if he could see me plain as day. He came to me to tell me things. To show me things. At first I thought that’s all it was. Strange dreams from the trauma of that night that would fade from feeling real to obscure as soon as I woke. One night, in my dream, I asked him why he was on the bridge that night, and he said he’d show me. He took me down there and he showed me.

The bridge was constructed by Heinrich Barthelham in 1873 as a way for he and his associates to avoid having to travel all the way around the ravine from the London road. Very secretive the Barthelhams. In 1874, his wife committed suicide from that very bridge for reasons unknown. Some said depression, some hysteria, but the real reason, said the boy, was that Heinrich had caught Catherine stepping out on him. With her own brother of all people. Enraged with betrayal and convinced his infant twins had been born of incest, Heinrich entombed the babies into each pillar of the bridge alive to ensure the bridge would never fall, and the Barthelham name would never be betrayed again. He then threw the brother into the ravine and told his wife what he had done. And that is why Mad Shadow goes there – siblings born of siblings who all four died for the bridge. The energy of unbearable trauma feeds the power of the boy with no eyes.

I awoke the next day realising the absurdity of the story until I found my front door open and my feet cut with gravel. He didn’t need to visit me in my dreams any more after that. The first time he appeared in my waking plane I was so afraid. My gut wrenched and my muscles failed as I turned off the lamp that night and he appeared there in the dark standing in the corner of my room, arms outstretched. My god I was petrified. I turned the light back on and he wasn’t there anymore. A grey skinned hand rose up from under the bed and flicked off the light. The moment darkness filled the room again, he was there, standing over me. I asked him what he wanted. He said… he said ‘I just want to show you’. I asked him who he was. He stared down at me like an inquisitive hound. He said –

‘I never learned my mother’s name. I don’t know my own either. They call me the Mad Shadow. I have no idea what year I was born, or who was aware of my existence at the time besides mother. I was born into darkness and it was the Shadow who raised me. The Shadow cast from distant flame, dancing across the walls of my basement prison, who told me all there is to know about this desperate world and how to weave it. The sin of man is ignorance, you see, not violence. I am Mad Shadow, envoy to the Infallible Hand.

I escaped the black prison underneath my mother’s house and burned it down with her inside. It was the first time I had seen the light of the outside world, the light of hot flame, and it burned me to the core. I couldn’t stand it. The pain. The light is the irrefutable enemy. The light drowns the Shadow and causes it great agony, so I plucked the deceiving olives from my face and the warm embrace of the darkness enveloped me forever. The Shadow shows me the way. The terrible way. The beautiful way. It makes nothingness of us all.

The helots believe I have been consumed by the black madness’, he said. ‘They do not see what I see there, in the endless nothingness of the void, for it isn’t blackness. It isn’t a colour you could describe to me. It is purest nothing and it hides all the secrets of Shadow. The spinning web that holds together the fabric of everything we can comprehend. It speaks to me without words, guides me without a path. The Shadow knows all and IS all. Black madness? No. This is total enrichment of the soul’.

He kept coming back, Mad Shadow, and I didn’t want him to. Not at first. But he began to show me things. How to connect with the void. How a special kind of meditation reveals the Shadow behind sight that he spoke so fondly of. The first time I saw it, it was just shapes like pure blackness in the dark. But soon it began to communicate with me. Have you ever heard the voice of God? This is what it is. The Midas touch. I began to experience it all. All of the pleasures of the universe, complete fulfilment and enrichment of the soul without ever leaving my house. In the presence of the Infallible Hand I felt like an ant trying to understand the complexities and sophistication of the human race. Unfathomable, but something inside of the soul stirs, like intuition. Something you can’t even imagine is communicating with you without you knowing how. We spent so long looking out into the cosmos for answers, for secrets, that we became ignorant of the very fabric of time and space surrounding us, created for us, limiting us. But I am trapped within this bestial prison no longer. I can see the stars for what they are. Just a facade hung there that we may play our parts in the panto with little more than vague wonder for the beyond. Make no mistake my friend, the gods are not out there beyond the universe. They’re right here. They are the pages. They are the ink. It is so much more than we ever could’ve imagined.”

I sat across the room from Bradford, this utter madman, trying to make any of the pieces of this puzzle fit. What on earth was he on about? And how did he ever come to be in such a state? He answered.

“I was deceived”, he said, “For knowing secrets on a cosmic level have their consequences, and the gods are just as ruthless as they are cunning. Mad Shadow taught me how to meditate and connect with the gods. He did not tell me just how addictive being within the presence of the void is, or how much life energy it costs to experience the divine. An hour of meditation costs about a year of life, and the older I become in body, the stronger Mad Shadow and I become in mind. So I sit here before you my friend, my time desperately short, understanding deathless knowledge that I could not possibly explain to any one of you, and that little boy with no eyes, a deceiving spirit, continues to push me into the void… and I relish every second of it. I continue to thirst for it. It will take me soon.”

He was staring at his drink again. A fire was glowing across his eyes. Those eyes that for an instant I recognised as my friend’s. They snapped up at me and with wild panic within him the real Bradford I knew was there.

“Get out of here,” he snapped. “Please. Go.”

The face fell sullen and uncanny again, as if something inside had taken back control. The fire in the eyes gone, replaced by the milky whites.

“You must try it,” he said.

“Why would I want to do that?” I asked. “After what it has done to you? How is it worth it?”

“Oh it is absolutely worth it,” he said. “To dry out one’s corporeal form and become one with the outer being who hosts us? It is a bliss you can only imagine. Come. I will show you.”

Bradford stood up, his shrivelled frame looming over me in the firelight, arms reaching out for my face. I’d had more than enough. I told him I’d think about it but for now it was time for him to leave. He didn’t budge.

“Not until you have tasted the Shadow’s delights.”

Without betraying my inner terror, I laid a hand on his shoulder and looked him deep in the eyes.

“Ok. I will try it if you insist. But only if you toast first. It’s unsettling to me that you haven’t touched your port.”

He eyed me, an unspoken impasse. The eyes fell upon the highball glass and he hissed at me.

“Very well.”

He picked up the glass and downed the liquid in one gulp with no reaction. Not like Bradford at all. He loved his port, but he would only sip.

The recognisable face returned for a second and he coughed, letting a dirty cream spume slip from his mouth. He drew in a deep breath, licking the grotesque foam on his lips and managed a final word:

“Go.”

The man’s face twisted and convulsed, then he crumpled to the floor and lay there stone dead. Absolutely still, a slow stream of what looked like sand and river-foam leaking from his nose and mouth. I stood there aghast, my hand still held where his shoulder was. I took a step back and fumbled for my phone. Bradford’s jacket began to quiver. Was he still breathing? I bent down to feel his neck for a pulse when a puddle of sandy foam spilled from his clothing, large sand ticks hopping out along with that wretched smell of river decay. A small grey-blue hand reached out from behind his lapel. The fire went out. A cold icy fright crawled down my spine, jellifying my legs as I fell onto my back. I shuffled backwards. Two white hands  with blackened nails coming from my friend’s chest. The thing plopped out of his clothing and lay there foetal on the floor, my friend’s spine sticking out of its neck. The thing stretched out and the spinal column came away from it. Then I saw the face. Oh that face. The face of a dead boy with eyeless sockets and an aura of pure evil. The ghast crawled away from Bradford’s clothing and his body lay there deflated. This naked horrible ghost-boy thing crawled across the floor towards me, those voidal sockets locked on, wanting to drag me away. There’s no fucking way. I sprang to my feet in a burst of last-ditch adrenaline and hightailed it out of the house and into the car, spinning in the sliding ice as I took off into the night.

The police say I am a person of interest. I don’t know if that means I’m actually a suspect or not, but I have to stay local. Seems I spoiled a lot of Christmas dinners that night. I am living with my brother across town while they pull my place apart. They found Bradford’s skin at my house with his intact skull and a section of spine. From the neck down he was completely empty. The rest of him was found at his house, a small place just outside town. The autopsy results said he likely drowned in salt water. I have no idea. I have no idea what happened to my friend. I can’t forget that boy though. The one without eyes I saw in the rear-view mirror. Standing at the front door of my house, watching me as if it could see me plain as day. I backed into him. Heard his little body break under the wheels of my car. I watched his body laying there still as I pulled away. They never found it of course. Nobody believes my story. Why would they? It’s insane. Hell, I don’t believe it. I know what I saw though. And I know what I see now, at night, in my dreams. It was a dreadful Christmas.

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Bio:

Bam Barrow is an East Anglian based writer of occult fiction and folk horror with an unquenchable thirst for the dark, mysterious and extreme tenants of human behaviour. Look out for his collection of short stories ‘The Cult Of Cathexis’, was released with Translucent Eyes Press last year.

He is also the co-founder of Urban Pigs Press.

Twitter @snuff_club

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