I’ll tell you everything I told the police.
I never liked my boss. He was a jerk and treated me like trash. For years I meekly took it. Something went wrong; he’d blame me. An advancement opportunity arose for which I was perfectly qualified; he’d recommend somebody else. He never greeted me in the mornings or asked about my weekend. He never remembered my birthday. He was cruel, and an expert at playing people against one another. Over the years, he played most of them against me. So, yes, I had every reason to hate him. And as my hatred reached its boiling point, I needed a release. In a sense you could even say I snapped, but it was snapping by my standards. I didn’t want to go postal. All I wanted was to order a confetti bomb.
Because I’d never done anything like that, I didn’t know the first thing about it. For example, I knew there were websites, but not which ones were good, or even which ones were legitimate, so I chose at random and settled on the one I did because the design was nice, the prices seemed reasonable and they accepted BTC. The ordering process was simple. All I had to do after typing in my email (a freshly created fake one) and selecting a target address was choose a confetti level: low, medium, high, or beautiful pink. Because I wanted to get him good, I chose the last option, imagining it would be the hardest to clean up after.
I paid, pressed submit, and that was it.
Three days later, I received a video in my inbox.
I played it.
It started off black but with sound. I heard a doorbell, my boss’ voice asking if he had to sign for delivery, some faint knocking about, then a loud thud as if a box had been set down. Next I heard the un-blading of a utility knife and cardboard being cut.
A deafening bang!
As darkness faded away to colours and sunlight: a rain of multi-coloured confetti fell inside a ritzy-looking living room.
I saw my boss covered in confetti, brushing it from his hair and wiping it off his cheeks—but the look on his face wasn’t one of surprise, or even shock. It was the look of horror!
I saw him feebly lift the utility knife and point it at the camera as the camera moved toward him.
Music began playing as if from a music box, but it was the same short melody over and over, stuck in a loop, with a single raspy voice singing in whispers:
… lovely pink confetti …
… lovely pink confetti …
“Please, there’s been a mistake,” my boss pleaded. His hand holding the utility knife shook.
The camera moved closer.
As it did, a shadow fell upon the floor. A black, inhuman shadow. Umbra without penumbra. Crawling forward. Crawling onto…
My boss’ fear loomed ever greater, magnified with every passing second, every subsequent loop of that hideous music, until each crease on his face seemed etched permanently into his skin. Pale and unmoving, he looked like a grotesque statue of himself.
“Please,” he whimpered.
“Sing.”
… lovely pink confetti …
… lovely pink confetti …
He sliced at the camera with the utility knife—
A clawed hand caught his wrist.
“Sing.”
“Lovely… pink confetti,” he sang in a heartbeat staccato. “Lovely pink confe—”
The claws tightened, his wrist bled; he gasped! The utility knife dropped to the floor.
As a second set of claws swiped almost imperceptibly across the screen, opening four parallel wounds on his chest. Four red lines bleeding sickeningly downward.
He sobbed.
The shadow had climbed to his neck.
His choked, animal sounds were adding a perverse and terrible rhythm to the music.
… lovely pink confetti …
… lovely pink confetti …
The shadow enveloped him.
The claws carved.
His screams—
The video ended, leaving me in stunned silence. I had seen things online but never anything like this. This was a death video, a murder video. Worse: it was a murder video with which I was directly involved. I wiped an accumulation of sweat from my mouth and sat down to think about what to do next. It didn’t take long. After a few deep breaths, I called the police and reported a murder. “I have video evidence,” I said.
Within ten minutes, three police cruisers were out front. Lights flashed. The police searched my house, then two officers took me and my laptop down to the station, where I sat in an interrogation room and recounted what happened:
The same story I’ve now told you.
They asked several times for my boss’ name and address, and presumably watched the video.
After several hours, one of the detectives returned to the interrogation room and told me I was free to go. “Whatever fucked up game you’re playing, I don’t get it and I don’t want to get it,” he said, then explained that my boss was alive and that the video showed him opening a confetti bomb, being mildly startled and starting to clean up.
“Impossible,” I said. “I saw—”
“Go home.”
They gave me back my laptop.
But when I opened it later that evening, the video was gone. I had played the video directly from my email account, to which I had purposefully stayed logged in, and now the entire message was gone.
When I checked the confetti bomb website, everything was the same except that the only confetti options were low, medium and high.
There was no beautiful pink.
Perhaps I would have even entertained the possibility I had somehow madly fantasized about my boss’ gruesome death if not for two factors. First, the police had admitted the existence of a video (albeit not one showing murder) and now there was no video, so they must have deleted it. Second, when I went to work the next morning my boss was not the same.
I don’t mean he’d been replaced by a different person. What I mean is he was no longer sarcastic, manipulative or really much of anything. He did discipline me with a week-long suspension for my prank, but even that he delivered in a droning monotone devoid of emotion. Whereas before he would have stomped and thundered and subjected me to a campaign of ridicule and retaliation, now he did nothing. More: he was nothing: an emotionless shell which moved, acted and spoke like an automaton.
Sometimes when he’s sitting at his desk, staring bovinely at his computer screen, the light from the adjacent window hits just right and I can make out an atlas of tiny lines on his skin, as if someone—or something—had cut him into pieces before stitching him back together again.
He greets me in the morning, remembers my birthday and I even got a promotion.
There is one more thing, however.
On a Saturday afternoon two months after the confetti bomb incident, there was a knock on my door. When I looked outside, I saw an unattended brown cardboard box. It was quite heavy, but I managed to pick it up and carry it inside. Given what had happened, I was hesitant to open it, but curiosity eventually got the better of me, and when I managed to get it open—
A deafening bang!
Followed by a shower of beautiful pink confetti.
Fleshy, bloody strips of confetti.
Raining down upon my body and upon the entirety of my home.
Confetti sliding down the window panes.
Confetti clogging up the drains.
Confetti gathering in sloppy puddles on the floor.
Confetti made of gore.
It took me days to clean up, and in truth there’s likely still confetti in the deepest cracks and darkest corners, but there was something else in the cardboard box: a sheet of paper emblazoned with the confetti bomb website logo, thanking me for my purchase of their soul-shredding service and offering three coupon codes for future soul-shredding redeemable by me or anyone—at 33.4% off the regular price.