Bogleech.com's 2016 Horror Write-off:
The Edge of Time
Submitted by
Anonymous
When humanity discovered the power to travel back in time, it took every ounce of self control the researchers had to not to break the news the very instant they succeeded. It's a good thing they didn't, too. Going back in time isn't like they imagined it would be.
It's not exactly traveling back in time, either. More like... Imagine if the world were a roll of film. Every second is a new slide, a new picture, but only the background remains the same. The actors in the foreground change places, constantly moving, shifting from frame to frame and leaving the empty backgrounds in the past slide. We don't know why this is, but it seems the actors are the only things that move forward.
A copy of the world itself lingers in the past, but the living keep walking. Every living being continues on while the brave chrononaut stays behind in a world now barren and still. Buildings and homes stood tall, cars lingered on the streets, but no life existed. There was no grass, no trees, no insects, no animals, no people. The air never moved, and no noise echoed. The sun no longer existed in the sky, but there was still light enough to show no clouds hung up there, either.
And then there was the danger of lingering too long in the past. The longer you stayed, the more blurred everything became. Everything began to darken over time, taking on greater and greater water damage. No one is sure where it comes from or why, but slowly everything became progressively waterlogged, the water levels rising almost constantly, flooding everything and breaking everything down. Concrete softened and crumbled into the water, steel melted down into cold sludge, glass shattered and dissolved... And all this occurred not an hour into the past. The longer you stayed, the more surreal everything became. A world being forgotten, everything slowly blurring together and sinking into an ocean as wide as history is long.
We only know about the ocean from one of our greatest chrononauts, God rest her soul. She stayed in a crumbling, sinking world, despite us pleading for her to come back. It was too dangerous, but she was determined, determined to see how it all ended. She wanted to see the edge of time, where everything broke up and sank into the abyss. She got what she wanted. Six hours into the past, everything that once existed sinks completely away, blending together in a mess of what used to be.
"We tried to bring her back. We tried so hard, but she shattered her own suit. She was determined to see how time ended, where it all went, so she leapt off the edge of time and into its depths." That's what we told everyone outside the room. Told her family, told her friends, told the public and the press when we brought our discovery to light. We made her out to be a madwoman, we told them that time travel was too dangerous, its effects on humans too horrible, to continue experimenting with. We had to cover for what we saw that day, what we heard.
She didn't fall in. She was dragged in.