“The Fetch” (1980)

This long story by Robert Aickman is reasonably conventional horror business, given that little Aickman did was ever conventional. It’s more like folk horror, as “fetch” is an obscure 17th-century term for “the apparition or double of a living person, formerly believed to be a warning of that person’s impending death.” It’s not hard to see how that sense of the word could come to be. The fetch in this story is less of a doppelganger and more of a wraith, an old woman who hides her face and trails dripping seawater wherever she goes (as she evidently comes from the sea, and to the sea must we all return). Aickman’s stories tend to be long and he takes his time getting to his points. It works because his language, however dreamlike, remains clear and straightforward, and the payoffs do come. In this first-person tale the narrator details his three strange sightings of this particular fetch, which do indeed augur deaths or, in one case, a disappearance. My favorite detail about this apparition is either the turning of the fetch’s face or the dripping seawater. She simply keeps her face out of sight, even if she’s turning to look at a far wall as she climbs a staircase. Aickman might be leaning into the smell of the seawater a little hard for him. It’s not as overbearing as the recurring “fishy” smell that we get, for example, from H.P. Lovecraft in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” but it seemed unusually pushy for Aickman. He is generally more reserved and holding back as a rule, setting a leisurely pace that slowly becomes hypnotic. As an article of folk horror, “The Fetch” is specifically focused on sightings of the apparition. They are the high points even when they are approached somewhat sidewise. Sometimes I think everything Aickman does is sidewise. But it’s also, when you think about it, the way most people experience the supernatural, if they do. It always happens kind of in the corner of your eye, and rarely when you go looking for it. Whatever you believe it seems most of us experience the strange and inexplicable one way or another. Most of us have an anecdote. That confusion and uncertainty about how to take it is where Aickman’s stories live.

Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea
Story not available online.