The Terrifying Shadow of Mundanity

Everyone preaches “Love thy neighbor.” Everybody opposes the oppression of capitalism, colonialism, and every other Ism out there. Countless people who couldn’t point Ukraine on the map are now chanting “Glory to Ukraine". An obscene amount of people who didn’t care about the British monarchy are now protesting its existence. The moment evil rears its ugly head, the public pays its full attention solely to it, usually leaving the victims as an afterthought. Nobody cares about the victims because they are faceless statistics to be flaunted in opposition to the charming and charismatic face of the dark side of humanity.

Again and again, I’ve seen this happen as portraits of the thing that took my nephew, portraits I’ve provided the authorities are displayed all over the news. It’s always that monster whose face they show. It’s always the stupid nicknames they give that murderer that I keep hearing; the Gray Woman, the Child Cannibal, Fish’s Granddaughter, and so forth. I have yet to have seen or heard anyone mention Arthur Coughlin or any other of the kids she took. Nobody cares about my nephew. He’s a statistic. They found a dead kid decomposing in a ditch with five other child corpses.

They act like it’s meant to protect the children and their families from reprisals or to protect their identities as minors. It’s all bullshit. There are no ratings and no outrage in showing the faces of some nameless victims. They don’t matter, and neither do their families. Arthur’s mother, my sister, Annie… She’s dead… Killed herself, unable to cope with the grief of the loss of her son. Unable to handle seeing the face of that bitch who took her child. She couldn’t fucking look at herself in the mirror in her last months alive because nobody could find, see, or know anything about that cunt. She’s just too fucking mundane. Too fucking average to be noticed. Too slick to be caught. Too monotone to even be noticed.

My camera caught her on video, in the act, and yeah, she’s just a fucking average Jane Doe you couldn’t tell from a crowd of Jane Does. Dark, middle-length hair, dark average-sized eyes, average head, average body type. Simply unremarkable.

All of this started three years ago when Arthur kept complaining to Ann that he’d been seeing someone coming to him at night. A lady is what he called it. Describing it to be nothing short of mundanity dressed as a human. He’d keep telling Ann that whenever she showed up, he wouldn’t be able to move for a while in her presence and would only regain mobility once she faded into the darkness.

Seeing as how it was my sister’s son, she couldn’t convince him these were night terrors or sleep paralysis. The kid was adamant something was watching him. And that’s where I come into the picture. I offered to place cameras all over Ann’s house to prove to him that nothing was haunting him.

After that, we finally quelled his fear of the demonic lady who was disrupting his sleep. I showed him the footage recorded during nights the strange apparition frequented him. At first, he argued the surveillance cameras couldn’t see ghosts, but eventually, he relented and learned to deal with his recurring nocturnal inconvenience. The nagging stopped, and everything was fine in the world again.

Until one morning, I get a call from my sister, right after finding out I had ten missed phone calls from different relatives. Annie was frantic and panicking. Her voice was cracking as she choked on her own tears and was on the verge of losing her battle against exhaustion.

Arthur had disappeared. He was nowhere to be found. No one had seen him, not the neighbors, not any acquaintances, nobody, nothing. As if the world had swallowed him. Without even thinking about it for an extra second, I raced to Annie’s. Nearly killing myself in my reckless driving to reach my sister.

Once I got there, we were both erratic and my mind and body flew on autopilot. I pulled out everything the cameras had recorded and started searching for whatever had happened to Art the night before.

He was in bed by eight-thirty. Everything was fine and uneventful for the next five hours. We all watched in dread and horror as a figure suddenly appeared in the frame of his room. As if out of nowhere. A shadow crawls out of the nothingness and takes the shape of a person in the recording.

I rolled it back multiple times and I couldn’t find anything or anyone breaking in or entering.

She - it just appeared.

The next few minutes became the most haunting moments of my life. Ann, my parents, and I all watched footage of this figure approaching Art’s bed and picking him up before turning and facing the camera. Smiling at it and leaving the room, disappearing once again from sight. The way she looked, the way she moved, the way she picked up the kid and left. Everything was normal, mundane, and unassuming. Average to the point of eeriness.

Annie completely broke down. She wept and cursed at the screen and wailed for her child to be returned to her. Our parents tried comforting her as I did my best to describe whatever had happened to the police.

The manhunt for that bitch had begun.

Unfortunately, it yielded nothing but a pile of dead bodies. Three weeks after the disappearance of Art, we found his body, with the remains of five other children. All of them were in varying stages of decomposition. The oldest remains were completely skeletal. The face of the monstrosity was everywhere. News, posters, papers… Everywhere. She had infected the entire universe with her presence. Yet, nobody had ever found anything. Not even a trace or a thread leading to her. Absolutely nothing.

It’s almost as if she never existed.

Three months after Art’s death, I became a father. And two years later, I fathered twins. Ann never recovered. Six months ago, the last straw broke the camel’s back, and Annie took her own life. When I found her, she had a poster of the ghoul paused on her TV screen. She hanged herself, unable to bear to see the growing legend of this monster again and again while simultaneously seeing her child’s memory fading into obscurity.

I didn’t have it much easier. All this grief, all that pain. It was taking its toll on me, and I noticed myself developing a habit of drinking a bit too much. Without my wife finding me hanging by one hand from our fourth store apartment, I would’ve died. It wasn’t intentional; I don’t think so. I don’t remember enough to know. I’ve toned down my drinking since… and I never drink alone anymore. Now, that I have kids to raise.

No matter how much better my life had gotten, one thing seemed to get worse. I think I’ve conditioned myself to dread the diabolical face of that monotone creature. With each viewing of her portraits, I’ve felt more and more uncomfortable around them. I don’t know if it’s the paternal instinct or what, but I just came to a point where I can’t stand looking at that unremarkable face. It makes my skin crawl, despite its averageness.

It all came to a head a few days ago, as I was walking back home from a football game. It was raining, and I was lost in my thoughts when I bumped into someone. We apologized to each other and only then I finally saw the person in front of me.

My body and soul froze, pins and needles pricked my skin, and a rock formed in my throat, threatening to suffocate me. The pounding of my heartbeat echoed in my ears as I watched the world turn still and black. My gaze locked onto the mass of humanity in front of me. Average in stature and size. The empty yet piercing gaze in its brown eyes; violating and welcoming all at once. Far more terrifying than any psychopathic stare. The unassuming evil yet innocent smile formed with a maw of unmatched yet improbable malevolence. The monotonous and monochrome presence of an impossible humanoid shape was obviously inhuman, yet so very much human.

A stifling sensation of fear paralyzed me as I was staring deep into the nonexistent soul of the misanthrope that had taken the life of my nephew, that could’ve committed an entire genocide with its stare alone. An eerie calm emanated from this human-shaped nightmare and turned my entire body into stone as it smiled at me. Time froze all around us for a second that felt like an eternity while my life was being sucked into the black holes that constituted the eyes of the devil that took so much from me.

I came face to face with the woman that took so much from me and found myself being paralyzed by the terrifying shadow of mundanity that surrounded her until she finally retreated from sight back into the nothingness.