Don’t Touch Me

Don’t Touch Me

“Hey! Ells, wait up!” he called as she stood keeping a healthy distance from the middle balcony of the second floor. He strode to her, his voice eager to catch up with the friend he had seen not an hour ago, just as she had wanted, just as she had planned.

“It’s Eleanor, you know that,” she said flatly, yet with a tinge of a smile bleeding onto her face. Relief flooded over her as she saw him walk away from the center balcony.

“Oh c’mon, you’ve never heard of a nickname?” He smirked. “Plus, you know you love it, I see that smile.”

“Yes, yes,” Eleanor replied, “Flatter yourself however you please.” A soft smile played upon her lips. She glanced over at the center balcony and saw one of his friends, one that would definitely have something to say. One that would definitely bring him over there. Eleanor turned on her heel and gave a small wave of her hand as if to say ‘follow me,’ and then strode off. “Hey Ethan, so…”

“Oh, this should be interesting,” he said as he followed her. “You rarely ever start conversations.” His messy hair flitted as he turned to follow her.

“Mm,” she grunted, her palms ever cold turning a warm patchy soaked feeling. She resisted the urge to pull her glove from her hand and let the cool air chill her to her bones. Cool down her ever-building nerves so that the glass shield holding back the stress could retemper itself. Yet after the last time she had removed her glove in public, she feared doing it again.

***

The sky had opened up like God breathing mist down upon the earth, the haze wrapping around the cars and buses traveling to school that day. It was dark, and cold, and mere weeks before the yuletide festivities would have begun in Scandinavian culture. Eleanor’s cloth-covered hands brushed against the steering wheel, then shifted the old beater into park. She stepped out into the mist, inhaled deeply, and held her breath. Held for a long time, then with a heave of her shoulders exhaled. She readjusted the blazer making explicitly sure to cover every inch of skin. 

Lawrence County High was a clustered catastrophe of a school. Kids lined the halls slamming into each other, all just as entitled to their stupidity of walking on whatever side of the hall they pleased. The noise of their hyena cackles refracted off the linoleum floors and bounced all around. Booming around and creating an echo chamber. Every now and then someone would move near Eleanor to body-check her, fighting to get through the crowd of bodies in order to class within the impossible four-minute class changes. And during each of those four-minute stampedes, Eleanor dodged and weaved her way through,  so precisely and so far that one would think the mere touch could kill her. She shivered against the cool air as she passed the center of the school. An open spot where the second floor could overlook the poor souls condemned to fight through the first, now redecorated and adorned with benches and an American Flag. Standing proudly like a soldier at attention, the eagle’s point at the top, so sharp it sliced through life itself. Near there the air got impossibly cold, a shiver down to the bone cut clean through her spine and held with a vice grip. She found herself staring at the point, taking in the impossibly cold feeling, and the agitated feeling that settled over her. Her skin stood on end as every muscle screamed the same word. “Death.” Curiously she slowly took off her glove.

That’s when he slammed into her. The British exchange student who was completely lost and paying attention to anything besides where he was walking. Like gravity, his arm pulled towards and crashed into her painfully uncovered bare hand, and before she could even register what had happened, she was instantly forced into the hazy dreamscape. 

She was running down the empty halls, viewing through his eyes. He ran, something, or someone…? Chasing him. He ran to the center of the second floor of the school, pouring on the speed. Muttering something incomprehensible in this flash of haze, he reached the center with the railings and peered over. His chest tightened with fear, true and utter horror, the dark looming shape behind him burned with an energy of anxiety and dread. He realized he had backed himself into a corner and as he turned to run. He recoiled as an impossibly cold icy hand landed on his shoulder, tripped on his own laces, and spilled over the railing. Like gravity, his body recoiled to and over the railing. Eleanor felt the fall, seemingly endless and stretching. Then she felt the point of the eagle, pierce clean through his back as the vision abruptly shattered into blackness like glass pouring into the infinite abyss.

When she came to, she was on the ground, backing up in fear, panting heavily with tears threatening to prick over her eyes. He looked at her apologizing profusely.

“Oh bloody hell, I am so, so sorry!” he said, concern dripping in his tone. “I was so focused on my music I didn’t see you, honest. Here Love, let me help you up.” He reached to try and pull her up by her hand but she recoiled away from his touch. 

“M- my glove…” she said. Eleanor saw her glove on the ground a few feet away, and as she slowly stood to go grab it, he scooped it up for her. A scream built in the back of her throat as he handed it to her with a sweet smile, blissfully unaware of what he’d done.

“Here you go, Love.” She gingerly took the glove, trying her best not to touch the place where he touched it, but it didn’t matter. The vision had already happened and it was already burned into her mind. “Name’s Ethan by the way.”

“I…” she said… “Bye,” and she sped away as fast as she could. 

***

“Oh c’mon, Ells.” Ethan ran to catch up with her swift strides. “You can’t just say you have something to tell me and then run off!” He caught up to her and put his hand on her shoulder and she instinctively flinched away. “Sorry,” he said. “I forgot, I didn’t mean to startle you.” His playful smile gave way to regret and worry.

Using all of her will, Eleanor placed her gloved hand on his arm. “It’s okay, it’s just a reflex is all.” She smiled sweetly at him, a strange and foreign feeling as her stomach did somersaults. “And I think you’ll find I quite well can do what I please,” she smirked and turned on her heels as she walked off. He chased behind her.

“Yeah, well that’s fine,” he said. “I think I know what you were gonna say anyways, you tease.” Eleanor stopped in her tracks, her heart sinking into her stomach.

Oh shoot. Please, please, please don’t have feelings, a small voice in the back of her head called. Another shouted in indignance only one word: hypocrite.

“Oh?”

“Yes. I will.”

“Will what?” she said slowly.

“Clearly you were gonna ask if I wanted to get coffee with you.” Ethan ran his hand through his hair, a bashful grin on his face. “The answer is yes, I will.” His lip quivered slightly and his eyes darted around. Eleanor spent a moment just staring at him, watching as he fidgeted with his ring in anticipation, and as his eyes searched hers for some hint of an answer.

“I uhm,” she started. “I don’t know.” She trailed off. She didn’t want to let this happen. She couldn’t. Eleanor already knew his fate and it wasn’t pretty. She had only wanted to protect him, to stall and maybe one day prevent it, but this was something else entirely. She tugged at her glove as she felt her hands become uncomfortably patchy hot. Blood rushed up to her face and she was suddenly keenly aware of the way her glasses rested on her face. Aware of the slight itch her sweater gave her, and the extra heat her cardigan produced. “I… I have a lot of homework.” 

Ethan’s eyes fell immediately. “Yeah, but like, we could always work on it together, y’know?” He went to reach out and then pulled back. “Ells- Eleanor, c’mon. Just a coffee, promise.” He stuck out his pinky.

She tried her best to resist her smile. “Just a coffee?”

“Just a coffee.” He smiled. She stuck out her gloved pinky and locked it with his, her smile finally breaking loose. 

***

The first month was fantastic. Countless afternoons after school were spent studying in coffee shops and casting sweet smiles towards each other over coffee cups. Their eyes met like strings of fate guiding the two to each other. Though Eleanor was initially reserved and hesitant, she slowly let her walls fall.

One night under the light of the full moon, the two broke into an abandoned quarry at the suggestion of Ethan, claiming he found just the spot. They sat on top of a broken excavator staring up at the stars. To most people, the stars seemed to just be balls of gas burning millions of miles away, but Eleanor, who could read the future itself in them, couldn’t help but turn away.

“Hey,” Ethan said, “what’s on your mind?” he touched his bare hand to her gloved.

“I just…” she said. “Have you ever heard of the Dark Watchers?”

“Woah, topic change,” he said. “The cryptids, yea?”

“Mhm.”

“Well, I don’t know much about them.” He scratched his neck, the way he did when he was nervous. “Wanna tell me about them?”

“They’re old folklore, firstly, calling them cryptids is an insult to their roots.” She smiled playfully at him. “But they supposedly were these shadow figures you would see out of the corner of your eye, just off the beaten trail. They’d lead people to their inevitable demise and disappearances. Some even said they saw everything, and I mean everything. Imagine having a crime committed against you and your only witnesses were these things who couldn’t ever share the truth.”

“Or maybe they just don’t want to,” Ethan said. Eleanor looked over at him. 

“Hey, I mean, that’s not fair.” 

“Why not?”

“I mean, what if they just didn’t want to tell anyone out of fear of being insane?”

“The cryptids?”

“Folklore!” She pulled her hand away. The silence held in the air between them was heavy. “I’m sorry.”

“Is everything alright, Ells?” He turned his full body toward her, taking his eyes off the stars.

“I…” she started. She imagined herself as a dark form, vaguely humanoid and viewing the world through eyes far from them. The vision of Ethan’s fate shivered against the back of her mind as she scrambled to think of something, anything to say. Instead, she just watched from the distance, knowing deep down that any attempt to articulate what she knew, what she could see, would end her up in a looney bin. They stayed quiet for a moment. “If you knew you were going to die… soon. Like soon soon. Would that… I don’t know, scare you?” 

Ethan stayed quiet, very quiet. His brow crinkled and he stared back up at the stars. The two sat like that for what felt like an eternity, but just as Eleanor was about to say something, he replied.

“No,” he said. “It wouldn’t.”

“What? How?” Eleanor gaped at him. “You wouldn’t try to fight it or prevent it?”

“Nah,” he said. “I mean, if that’s fate, y’know, could I even fight it?” 

“I guess,” she said. “The Ancient Greeks seemed to think you couldn’t.” She stayed silent and stared up at the stars, tracing the invisible lines creating the Pegasus and Hercules under the light of the blue hues of the moon.

“Well, what do you believe?” he asked her. He shifted to look at her, his brown hair sweeping across his face, and a part of Eleanor wanted to reach out and drink it in despite knowing what would eventually come for him.

“Well…” Her palms grew patchy underneath her gloves, and she shifted in her sweater, the wool scratching at her skin. “S- some cultures devised rituals to become masters of their own fate…”

“And do you believe in them?”

“I believe in you.” As soon as the words left her mouth she wished she hadn’t said them. The walls of the quarry seemed to loom around her, and a sound like rushing water filled her ears. Distantly a crack of thunder boomed and somewhere outside of her own mind Ethan turned to look at the storm clouds brewing in the distance. He’d hate her now, or worse yet maybe this would be what caused him to run, to fall, and to die. She turned away and began to move off the excavator when his hand grabbed hers.

“Wait,” he told her as he pulled her back near him and stared into her eyes. Her heart pounded as thunder roared in her ears, a magnetic force like gravity pulling them together. Like an invisible string weaving through their hearts and pulling them to destiny, and before she had time to think of the repercussions he kissed her. Kind and sweet, not brief nor awkwardly long. The kind that you hear of only in crappy romance novels in the discount section of Barnes & Noble. Yet it didn’t matter, as the second their lips locked, Eleanor’s eyes saw a different scene. Over and over again back in that hallway as Ethan ran, terrified. She watched him fall in a thousand different ways that seemed to stretch forth infinitely. Endlessly feeling the point of the eagle stabbing through her chest, unable to breathe and unable to fully die until the vision started again. So potent and so real, and so gods damned scary. This was his fate, as sure as the sun comes up in the east, Ethan would die young and impaled through an American flag. Unless… 

“If someone told you they could break your fate would you let them?” she asked when they pulled away. 

“I- I guess?” he said. His eyes searched hers for some kind of answer to where this was going.

“Is that a yes?” she said.

“Yes,” he said after a moment. “Yes, if someone could break my fate in this hypothetical where I would soon die, I’d let them.” Then Eleanor did what shocked even her, she leaned in and kissed him again, visions be damned. Of course, they flooded over her, a mocking reminder of what could come. Could, not would, her heart steeled over with resolve. She would break his fate, of that much she promised herself.

The second month was the typical lovely honeymoon period, with light kisses and promises whispered by moonlight phone calls. They walked the halls hand in un-gloved hand, and after a while, Eleanor learned to tune out the visions, or at least function during them. They served as a reminder, a promise, for her goal. When Eleanor wasn’t with Ethan, she was curled up somewhere with an old book on ancient cultures and their practices, or in the back of her favorite old antique occult store buying every last alleged grimoire they had. She spent hours pouring over those books from cover to cover, studying each ritual with such care that the words of power stuck in her mind like caramel to the roof of a young child’s mouth after eating a Milky Way bar. 

By the third month she had begun to test out the rituals, and one by one they disappointed her. As each ritual slowly turned into a farce, Eleanor’s eagerness and sweetness turned to bitter desperation. A looming death clock over her head ticking down with an unreadable timer, but obviously there. She clung to Ethan more and more in her free time, wrapping her arms and interlocking herself to him.

The fourth month almost was the end. When out of class one day Eleanor walked out and saw Ethan near that balcony. That freaking balcony. 

“Ethan!” she yelled, her voice echoed across the concrete floors. He jumped a bit and turned and gave her a weak smile. She strode to him. “Hey, c’mon, I’ve got this movie I wanna see.”

The fifth month is when things got bad. Eleanor started sleeping less and less as the visions started visiting her even when she wasn’t touching Ethan. And when he was nowhere to be found, she desperately scoured social media and snap maps to find him, just to know he was safe. Just to know that she still had time.

The sixth month finally gave a breakthrough. It was faint at first, the ritual was so faded and so far in the back of an old grimoire that she could barely read the Latin scribblings. She studied those old pages like they were her ten commandments, and when she finally was able to transcribe them, they told of an old magic from an age past. From an age before written history, an age before humanity, an age before God. Fata Cultri it was called, translating loosely to The Knife of Fate. The process of learning it was grueling, and painful at times. Eleanor hoped the amount of times she had watched Ethan die would be enough to prepare her for the mental strain of a magic so strong, but she hadn’t been more wrong about anything in her life. By the end of month six, she had barely even been able to feel the magic within her, only the toll that trying to summon it had on her body.

By the seventh month she looked like a zombie, possessive and obsessive and bone thin. Ethan had started becoming harder and harder to find, but it took a mere glance at her phone through Find My iPhone to know where he was, and when she found him, she would wrap her arms around him and lean into his warmth. It would be over soon.

When the eighth month finally came, she had her first hint of even being able to wield Fata Cultri. It was nothing more than a spark of black flame between her thumb and index finger, but for a brief moment, the power manifested in her hands. She promptly passed out. When she woke up a day later, she knew to ignore the messages on her phone. She finally had it. She spent the entirety of that month practicing, day in and day out. So much so that the school called home to ask if she was okay. Senioritis, she told her parents, burnout. She’d be back soon.

In the ninth month, it finally happened. The flame between her fingers held, and held, and held. Then, as she grasped hold of the magic, she felt it resonate within her. She quickly checked the grimoire to see the next step. As she took hold of the magic flowing through her veins, she began to expand her fingers outwards. Feeling the ancient power course through her, a feeling old beyond time washed over her. The words from the grimoire swirled around her mind. The Power to Wield Fate Like a Knife. It was hers. As she grew the flame in her hands it slowly morphed into a warped glass-like effect, until within her palm she held a space out of time. It looked as though shards of the universe itself floated in the null space of her palm. Slowly, she gripped at the air and pulled a wicked dagger made of the dark flame glass. It stood out against the world; it didn’t belong, didn’t compute. She almost thought she could see strings connecting to her as she held it, and as she went to cut them, she felt the knife slip from her clutches as the magic retreated back within her. She was immediately exhausted, but now had a wellspring of power.

Azathoth. That was the name of the eldritch god from which this power was drawn. To invoke him would be to drive fate’s knife into the world and cut at the necessary strings. This power, immense enough to drive that minds of men into madness irrecoverable, called from the far corner of the universe and dragged from the supple unconsciousness of the eldritch elder. When in the small blip called the Milky Way, Eleanor called upon this power, a shiver danced across the brain of Azathoth, and for the briefest of moments in all of his blindness, he stirred, seeing a school and a fate to be cut. As quickly as it appeared, however, it left, back into the recesses of his dreams and his consciousness faded back to God-like REM. 

“Ells, I’m worried about you,” Ethan had told her one day of the tenth month. “You’re not eating as much, and you look-”

“I look what?” she snapped. “Huh? So suddenly you care about looks?” Her shoulders sagged and her glassy eyes stared hollowly at him. She took a few deep rasps in as the dust on her bones creaked.

“That’s not what I’m saying Eleanor, and you know that.” He shifted and put his hand on her shoulder. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I’ll be fine, it’s just a cough.”

And that cough bled into the night, followed by ethereal flashes of impossibility and knives like a fire cutting into the blackness of the infinite expanse. A single name uttered like an incantation of truth. Azathoth. Azathoth. My being most blind. Across the stars the words skittered down his nervous system and jolted his unthinking mind, sending violent shattering through Eleanor’s bones while the threads of her mind snapped one by one. A godly synaptic gap fired between a mortal and something undivine, a plea of desperation built up underneath one person’s worth of pressure. Then launched from the desolate rock she called home across the aether waves and into the mind of madness, where frantic violins scintillate a calming melody giving way to the malady of the blind idiot god. Azathoth. Who’s consciousness was death, and whose dreams were reality. Azathoth, whose mind is most ancient now, dreamed of chasing a young boy down a school hallway. Whose mind ever old knew not of schools or love or passion, saw only yet a life string of fate, and heard the pleas of a string to be cut. Who now drew his first breath of conscious thought in millennia, and the universe around him shuddered with fearful anticipation.

It had been nearly a year since the fateful day when Eleanor had decided that Ethan was to be saved. Eleven months since she fell in love with the same person who every time they touched sent visions of pure suffering down her skin and straight through her spinal cord to the brain. Eleven months of preparation and now finally she could fix it.

Hey, meet me after school today okay? She sent him a text.

Uhm.. I’m a bit busy today… could it wait?

No. Gosh, Ethan, I know you have band today. Just meet me upstairs after, I’ll drive you home.

And that decided it. For across the expanse, the blind idiot dreamed it, and thus it was fate.

She waited there anxiously as the seconds slipped into minutes after rehearsal ended, and eventually, she saw him appear there and shoot her an anxious text. Hey, I’m here, where are you? Her body reverberated with power unrestrained as she began to will it upwards and walked out of the shadows to greet him.

“Hey!” she said as she approached.

“Hey Eleanor, look can we make this quick my mom needs me to watch my si- Jesus freaking Christ Eleanor you look terrible! Are you okay?” she frowned.

“That’s pretty freaking rude of you you know?” she told him. “It’s not like I’ve spent these last Eleven freaking months doing this for you!”

“Doing this for me?!” he said. “What? Being possessive and doing whatever this is? You need help, Eleanor!”

“Help? Help?” She threw her hands to her side as the dark energy began to expand like hot gas welling up in a container too small for it. “I am trying to free you of your fate, Ethan!” She saw something in him then, something changed.

“My fate?” He took a few steps back. “Eleanor w-”

“Eleven freaking months ago.” She took a step towards him. “You told me that if someone could break your fate…”

“I’d let them. I know what I said but…” He took a few more steps back, stumbling slightly and gripping onto a locker bank. “Eleanor, that… I’m not…”

“I’ve seen it, Ethan.” She reached her hands out to him, desperation crawling up her throat like a bitter bile. “I’ve watched you die thousands of times my Love… I can fix it, I will fix it.”

“Watched me- Eleanor, you need serious help. Come on, let’s just go okay? It’s going to be okay.” He stepped backward a bit more, he looked so small, so helpless. Just one small incision and fate would be broken enacted as it should. She frowned at him.

“No. Ethan.” She took another resonating step towards him. “I am going to do this. You can either resist it or let me like you said you would.” And then she invoked his name, calling forth his visage across the cosmos. Azathoth. Power surged through her veins as the knife formed in her hand. A crown of stars formed above her head as her eyes turned the milky white of the stars, spilling forward fractured and timeless. “N̴̢̛͛́͜o̶̡̻͗w̶̥̪͙̽̅ ̵̣͚̬̾͆s̸̠̍t̵̞̤͊ä̸̯̟͖́̐͘n̷̘͕͗͌̄d̶̝̣̻̉̀͠ ̴̻̣̚s̸̲̀̒̕t̴͍͚̪̔i̶̝͠l̵̖͇͝l̷͇̒̈͝.̷̖̑͜”

He ran. Like a gazelle from its impending doom, he saw the face of the true God and he ran, and Azathoth gave chase through his new visage. 

“Stay the hell away from me!” he said to her, tripping over his feet and down the hallways. “You’re insane!”

“Ethan, Ethan, Ethan!” Her speed was inhuman, a blinding blur of a predator knowing it had caught its prey. “I̶̻̞͑m̶̬͌ ̷̛̮̦̀j̵̙͐u̵̗͒͋s̸̤̝͒t̴͚̉́ ̸̧̙̈͂ẗ̵͇̭ṙ̴̥͕ŷ̸͍̝i̴͚͂n̷̬̽̈́g̶̟͍̾ ̸̢͚̀ţ̵̜̎o̷̻͑ ̸̡͐h̴̺̣͑̕e̸̠̯̋͗l̸͍̻͒̇p̵̘̮͋̽.̴͇̳̋̔.̸̬̹́̕.̴̺̠̔̕” The two sprinted down the halls of the school, as he looked back he saw her and the blind idiot through her. Infinite truth and finality, his end in front of him. He had no choice but to run, like a spider through the massive web of fate.

Yet through the futility of the chase, he found himself drawn to the second-floor balcony like gravity, backed against the railing with an intense fear pounding in his chest. 

Deep down a part of Eleanor’s memories shivered, the cold chill of death hung in the air. “Ethan don’t-”

“Don’t. Touch me, Eleanor!” he shouted, gripping the railing in fear. She knew there was only a split second between life and death, and as she reached to cut his string he leaned backward over the railing to avoid the knife’s edge. She clamped her hand down on his shoulder sending icy cold shock down to his core, and the knife cut the string. Essence so powerful, yet so subtle, blasted forth from the impact zone as he recoiled over the edge of the railing like gravity, and no matter how hard Eleanor tried to grip there wouldn’t be enough strength in a thousand universes to keep him from falling. She watched him fall in a moment that stretched across eternity, her scream reverberating across the walls of her mind and filling the unconscious space of the universe with her sorrow. A million lives across a million possibilities were lost in a single precise incision pulled like taffy across a single moment and ended with a sharp bloody spurting shink.

In the ancient stars, the mind of God shuddered with power, wreaking havoc across the near space destroying entire solar systems in its wake. Eleanor’s moment of sorrow was an eternity of torment across the near systems in the most ancient corner of the universe, as the fabric of what was real pulled apart with each moment Azathoth woke. Then, just as suddenly as it started it stopped.

Eleanor had done the only thing she could have thought to do and cut one final string. 

Author

Vinny Carr is an aspiring author and member of Neshaminy High School’s graduating class of 2024. Growing up surrounded by fantasy he quickly fell in love with the stories of sword and spell and developed a steadfast love for writing. Vinny hopes to one day write a saga that will stay in the minds of people for years to come, and bit by bit help people be seen in writing and have their own slice of fiction to escape to when they need it most.