SHAKESPEARE GOES TO HELL

Chris was just a regular kid, except for the unshakable fear of water that gripped him whenever he got too close, the kind of fear that didn’t make sense but felt as old as his bones. He barely remembered his grandfather, just a shadowy figure on the edge of memory. Except for the tape. On that flickering videotape, his grandfather had leaned close to the camera, explaining to five-year-old Chris the terrifying, mind-bending concept of the multiverse. "Endless worlds," he’d said, his voice heavy with something Chris now recognized as a warning. "Infinite possibilities, but every choice leaves a scar." At fifteen, curiosity got the better of him. He crossed the threshold into the forbidden attic, where the dust was thick and the air felt electric. And there it was. The thing. A strange, gleaming gadget his grandfather had left behind, unnoticed and unexplained, a machine that could tear open time like ripping fabric. Chris used it cautiously at first, opening rifts like wounds on reality. He wasn’t trying to change the world, just patch together his battered relationship with Zoe. A fight here, an awkward moment there, he fixed them all, like smoothing out wrinkles in a favorite shirt. But time has its own rules, its own price. And then, one day, he pushed too far. He went back, not just to fix Zoe, but to tamper with a classic piece of literature, in a past so distant, so dangerous, that one wrong move could unravel everything. His future. His existence. And maybe reality itself.