Elliot

Elliot had always been fascinated by time. As a physicist, he had dedicated his life to studying the nature of the universe’s most elusive dimension, but nothing could have prepared him for the discovery he stumbled upon late one rainy evening in his dimly lit basement lab. Amidst a clutter of old textbooks, circuits, and coffee-stained notebooks, he had accidentally cracked the code for time travel.

The mechanism was crude—a rickety chair bolted to a metal platform surrounded by a web of exposed wires and a humming control panel. Elliot hesitated, staring at the blinking console. This wasn’t a polished experiment, but curiosity outweighed caution.

After a deep breath, he punched in a date: March 3, 1998, exactly 27 years earlier. He chose this date on impulse—a time before smartphones, streaming, and when he was just a child. He set the timer for a two-hour window, adjusted the harness around his chest, and hit the activation switch.

A surge of energy engulfed him. Colors blurred into streaks of light, his ears filled with a deafening roar. Then, silence.

When the world reassembled itself, Elliot found himself standing in a sunlit park. The air smelled fresher, and distant laughter from children playing on a jungle gym reached his ears. He looked down; his modern clothes seemed out of place amidst the baggy jeans and windbreakers of the '90s. Panicking slightly, he ducked into a nearby alley and assessed his surroundings. A newspaper in a trash bin confirmed the date: March 3, 1998.

Heart pounding, Elliot wandered the streets of his old neighborhood. He marveled at the absence of digital billboards and the sight of people queuing at a payphone. It wasn’t long before he found himself outside his childhood home. The sight of it stirred a wave of nostalgia. Against his better judgment, he approached and peeked through the window.

There he was, a ten-year-old boy, sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, engrossed in a VHS tape of cartoons. His mother, younger and vibrant, bustled in the kitchen, humming to the tune of a pop song playing on the radio. Elliot’s throat tightened. He’d forgotten the warmth of these simple moments.

But as he lingered, a shadow passed over him. From the corner of his eye, Elliot noticed a man standing across the street, watching the house intently. Dressed in a trench coat and wide-brimmed hat, the figure exuded an air of menace. Elliot’s pulse quickened. Was this man from this time, or had someone followed him through the timeline?

The man’s gaze shifted, locking onto Elliot. For a moment, neither moved. Then, the stranger started toward him. Panic surged through Elliot as he ducked into a nearby alley, heart hammering in his chest. He pressed himself against the wall, straining to hear the sound of footsteps. They were getting closer.

Elliot’s mind raced. Who was this man? Had he tampered with something he shouldn’t have? He’d been careful not to interact with anyone, not to leave any trace, but the presence of this stranger suggested otherwise.

After what felt like an eternity, the footsteps stopped. Elliot risked a glance around the corner. The man was gone. Relieved but unnerved, he quickly made his way back to the park where he had first arrived. His two-hour window was almost up, and every instinct screamed at him to leave before anything else went wrong.

The hum of the return mechanism vibrated faintly through his body as he activated the device. The journey back was just as disorienting, but when he opened his eyes, he was back in his cluttered lab. The clock on the wall confirmed only a few minutes had passed in his own timeline. Shaking, he sank into a chair and stared at the time machine.

Elliot spent the next few days in quiet reflection. The past he had glimpsed wasn’t a revelation; it was a reminder. Life had been simpler, yes, but it had also been fleeting. And yet, the encounter with the mysterious man gnawed at him. Who was he? Had he been a random observer, or something more sinister?

As days turned to weeks, Elliot couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. Strange things began to happen in his lab—equipment would flicker without reason, shadows moved in his peripheral vision. One night, he awoke to find his notes scattered across the floor, pages torn and equations circled in red ink. Someone had been there.

Fearing he had opened a door to something far beyond his understanding, Elliot doubled his security, locking the time machine behind a reinforced steel door. But it wasn’t enough. One evening, as he reviewed his research, he felt the same presence he had encountered in 1998. Turning slowly, he saw the man from the past standing in the corner of the lab, trench coat dripping with rainwater that wasn’t from this time.

“You shouldn’t have meddled,” the man said in a voice that seemed to echo from all directions.

Elliot froze, words caught in his throat. The man stepped closer, placing a hand on the time machine. “You think you understand time, but it’s watching you now. You’ve been marked.”

Before Elliot could respond, the man vanished into thin air, leaving only the faint smell of ozone behind. Heart pounding, Elliot realized this wasn’t just about him anymore. Time itself had taken notice, and it wouldn’t let him off easily.

From that night on, Elliot’s dreams were plagued by visions of fragmented timelines, collapsing realities, and a haunting whisper: “Close the door before it’s too late.” But no matter how much he tried, the machine refused to be dismantled. It had become a part of the timeline, an anchor tethered to forces far beyond his comprehension.

One stormy night, Elliot awoke to find his lab bathed in an eerie glow. The machine had activated itself. Panicked, he approached cautiously, only to see his own reflection in the glow—but it wasn’t him. The reflection was older, with hollow eyes and a gaunt face. It spoke in a voice that chilled him to the bone: “You’ve unleashed the loop. You can’t escape it.”

The machine roared to life, pulling him forward with an invisible force. Elliot screamed, gripping the edges of the table, but it was futile. In an instant, he was gone.

When the lab was finally discovered, it was empty. The time machine sat cold and lifeless, its mechanisms locked as if it had never functioned. Yet whispers began to spread of strange occurrences—people spotting a man resembling Elliot at catastrophic moments in history, always at the edges of disaster, a silent observer.

Some believed he was trapped in a cycle of time, forced to witness the worst of humanity. Others thought he had become something else entirely, an agent of time itself. But the truth was darker than anyone could imagine.

As Elliot hurtled through the vortex of time, he realized the loop wasn’t just a cycle; it was a prison, and his captor was the very fabric of time. He was forced to relive not only the moments he had altered but also the countless consequences of those actions. Every step through history revealed how his interference had unraveled threads, creating ripples that cascaded into tidal waves.

One moment, he stood in the middle of a collapsing bridge, watching helplessly as people screamed. Another, he was in a darkened room, surrounded by faceless figures who chanted in languages he couldn’t understand. The horrors piled on, and each time he tried to intervene, he was pulled away, hurled into another fragment of chaos.

In one chilling instance, Elliot found himself face-to-face with the younger version of the trench-coated man. The man’s eyes burned with fury, and he whispered, “You’re not fixing anything. You’re the catalyst.” Before Elliot could respond, the vortex pulled him again.

Finally, Elliot landed in a cold, infinite expanse. Time stood still, a void where past, present, and future overlapped in a cacophony of whispers. He saw countless versions of himself, each trapped, each broken. And then the voice came again, omnipresent and unforgiving: “You thought you could control time, but time controls all. You are its servant now.”

Elliot screamed, but no sound escaped. He was trapped in the endless loop, a silent witness to the collapse and rebirth of reality itself. And somewhere, in the shadows of time, the figure in the trench coat watched, a reminder that some doors, once opened, can never be closed.