The Last Chronicles of Pete Mersill

by David Millican

tonight. Our apartment was only a couple of blocks away from the store which is why I had taken the job in the first place. I walked to work and my wife would use the car to take our daughter to school. Which is how Zene, the Russian girl from the deli, was able to catch up to me. Her pink and black hair stood out against the grey sky as I turned to see who was calling my name.

  “Pete, I heard you have problems with ghosts last night?”

  She wasn’t pretty, but she wasn’t ugly either. My wife Sara was better looking but I won’t lie, she’d been pretty cold the past few years. When Zene, whose real name was Zenechkacaka or something like that, flirted with me, I’d been interested but hadn’t acted on it. When she’d found out I was married she’d backed off. But she was fun to talk to so I made it a point to go to the deli every morning she worked. I’d grab a hot sausage biscuit and chat with her for a minute or two. When I didn’t stop by this morning she must have been worried.

  “I don’t know what happened. I’m probably just tired and…” I couldn’t finish the sentence; I knew it was a lie. I knew what I had seen.

  “I know you are smart man. You see something, I believe you see it. My aunt, she is…she knows about these things. You go see her and she will help you.” She punched a number into my phone and turned to leave but turned back to give me a quick peck on the cheek.

  I stared at her run back to the store trying to convince myself I was thinking about her statement and not watching her backside. Okay, so I was watching. Back at the apartment I waited for Sara to get back. We’d gotten Marissa into one of the more prestigious Charter schools on the other side of town, but it was only a thirty-minute round trip. I knew from experience she wouldn’t be back for another two hours. I took my shower, ate breakfast, and stared at the number in my phone.

  I should have gone to bed but I dialed knowing I wouldn’t sleep with the feeling of being watched. I’d had it before, but this time I didn’t dismiss it as a trick of the mind. This time I knew something stood in the corner of my kitchen eating granola out of the jar from the counter. When I looked at it, there was nothing there. But when I looked at the phone I could see the reflected image of a man with no skin munching away as though this were any normal day.

  The woman at the other end of the line, younger sounding than I had expected, gave me an address. I waited at the door for Sara, jogging out to meet her as she opened the door to our ancient Jeep Wagoneer. I grabbed the keys out of her hand, kissed her on the cheek, and pulled the driver’s door closed behind me. I didn’t look at her as I drove off. It hadn’t been the first time I smelled cigar smoke on her and I found it easier to not think about it than to face the consequences of what it would do to Marissa. But I did think of Zene on the drive over.

  Zene’s aunt turned out to be about three years younger than her, the result of Zene being an unexpected package of joy for her aging parents. She knew something was wrong the moment I stepped through the door. I won’t bore you with the details of the next hour of crushing herbs, burning incense, and shaking odd shaped dice out onto the table. I won’t bore you because she couldn’t tell me anything about what was going on, only that something was going on. She sent me to another woman who sent me to an old man who sent me to a young woman again who tried to send me to Zene’s aunt. When she found out I had already been there she sent me to a ‘last ditch effort’ in her words.

  This man, a mystic they called him, was Native American, but not from anywhere around Wyoming. He had deep brown skin with a gaunt face and blue eyes that didn’t seem out of place. He had what I needed, he knew what I had been seeing. That was the first time I heard the word Fetch. They go by many names, Fetch is the Irish one. He’d used some native word that I couldn’t even begin to pronounce, so I latched onto Fetch.

  He explained everyone is born with a Fetch, a creature with no existence in this world so it consumes yours. It steals your life energy away so that it can stay here till it is ready to move on. The longer it is here, the more energy it steals, the stronger it will be in the next world. The legends about the Fetch are like any legend, one part truth, and fifty parts stuff people made up. Doppelgangers, changelings, guardian angels, these are all parts of the Fetch legend, though none of the legends have the full truth.

  Even Hyan, the mystic, said most of the stuff he knew wasn’t reliable. He did know a few things for sure. He told me what they were, what they wanted, and how they stole your life. The most important thing he told me was how to kill mine. I wasn’t sure I wanted to but he assured me I needed to.

  This is a big deal so pay attention here, humans are immortal. That’s right, we never die from old age. How can that be, Pete? You say, I’ve seen so many old people die. No, what you’ve seen is so many old people murdered by their Fetches that couldn’t bear to be in this world any longer. They can last here permanently but they have no power, no real substance so they want to leave. At least they did before I screwed that all up, but we’re still not there yet. You can patiently wait to hate me as everyone else does.

  The point is if there is no Fetch leeching your life energy you’ll never die. After you hit about thirty, your body stops aging and you’ll live for eternity. This is where we get our legends of vampires, from people who have killed their Fetches. Now, this immortality only applies to aging, not injury, disease, or plain old self-destruction. As far as I learned in the intervening years, only three or four of those who have freed themselves from these leeches have made it past two hundred years old. Of those, only one still lives today. She is three-hundred and sixty, mad as a hatter, and not long for this world. She just can’t bear the sustained assault of death time has thrown at her.

  If you don’t believe me I have included a picture of my wife and I taken last year. To her dismay and my joy, she is drooping as bodies do when they make their way into the fifth decade of life. Her skin is tougher and the years of tanning and beauty products have left their mark on her face. I, on the other hand, still look like my studly thirty-six year-old self with all the strength and vigor that youth provides. It can be awkward though as my daughter just turned thirty-two and won’t be growing any older. An eternity at the same age as your daughter would be weird. But as I said earlier, I won’t live that long. The Fetch waiting for me will make sure of that.

  Back to the story, I went home with a knife blessed by Hyan and killed my Fetch two seconds after walking through my front door. I hadn’t expected there to be so much blood. I don’t know why, it was alive and it was a creature but for some reason I thought it would just die and disappear. It took me days to get the stains out of the carpet. Sara lost her mind. About the dead Fetch, not the carpet. She was cold and horrible to me but she wasn’t completely devoid of humanity.

  She’d seen me walk in the door, thrust the knife into empty air, and a translucent-skinned creature fall dead on her coffee table. It didn’t break though, which was impressive for a Goodwill purchase. I sat her down and explained what had happened while her Fetch looked on with interest. I kept an eye on it waiting for it to attack but it never did. I’ve learned that while Fetches are still attached to their humans they aren’t quite aware of other Fetches. Or even this plane of reality beyond their humans. Some are more aware than others, like my Fetch had been. It has to do with the amount of death you have seen in your life.

  I’ve seen a lot of death in my life, though most of it was before I could remember. My parents, stellar examples of love that they were, joined a cult while I was still in my mother’s womb. It didn’t take very long for them to lose themselves in the drugs and sex of the culture and I was left to be attended by the other young children in the cult as they got their worship on.

  But on the night that they intended to sacrifice me to their prophet, one of the kids, I never did find out who, called in the FBI. With bullets flying, fires burning out of control, and pieces of the cheap metal structures collapsing all around me, I lay on the altar having a good ol’ time with my guardian angel. Yep, you
guessed it, my Fetch. Fetches appear to you when you’re about to die. That is one of the most well known facts about them. Except, think about it, how do we know about it if the people they appear to are dying? Because Fetches ain’t prophets, they can’t tell the future.

  They have no special ability to know when you’re going to die and when not. They look at the situation around you and determine, ‘Hey, it looks like this kid’s been sent up the creek, might as well come and steal what life force I can before he kicks the bucket.’ But when you don’t die, they fade into the background again excited that they get to keep stealing from you, keep growing in power. Sometimes, like in my case I’m sure, they even step in and protect you, which is where the guardian angel thing comes in.

  But the point is, the more you face death, the more it happens around you, the more times you see your Fetch. And the more your Fetch is able to affect you. Or maybe, the more real they become in this world. Once again, I’m not sure how it all works. But what I do know is that the more you see them the more they see you. And that bond grows stronger over time.

  And before we move on, you’re probably