My Boss’s Death: A Nightmare on the News

The TV in the break room flickered, showing his face, calm and smiling, like always, and my heart stopped. My hands started shaking so hard I spilled hot coffee down my shirt, the dark, scalding liquid stinging my skin as the local news anchor read the headline, her voice sickeningly calm. It was him. Our HR director, Mr. Davies. The same man we had a somber memorial for just last week. They said he was dead.

My coworker, Sarah, walked in, saw the screen, and froze, her eyes wide, face draining of all color. “That’s impossible,” she whispered, her voice barely a breath, hands clenching her lunch bag until it creased. The segment played an old clip of him at a press conference, talking about city council tax reform, his usual calm, collected demeanor, a slight, unsettling smile.

But the news was talking about him in connection to *another* company, a tech startup in Arizona, not here in Boston. And this wasn’t last year; it was just months ago. The on-screen date stamp scrolled past: March 15th. That was *after* the funeral we all attended last Tuesday, a miserable, rainy day where we buried an empty casket.

The ancient fluorescent light above us flickered violently, plunging the break room into momentary, eerie darkness, the silence deafening, before humming back to life, illuminating his impossibly smiling face. Then, loud and clear, his personal phone started ringing in his office, just down the hall, vibrating through the thin wall. The ringtone was the same classical music everyone had heard from his pocket before.

👇 Full story continued in the comments…Sarah and I stared at each other, frozen in terror. The ring. It felt like a taunt. Slowly, tentatively, Sarah reached out, her hand shaking, and pointed towards Mr. Davies’ office. We didn’t move. The ringing continued, a shrill intrusion on the impossible.

Finally, I forced myself to break the paralysis. “I… I have to,” I stammered, pushing away from the table, the spilled coffee now cold and clammy against my skin. My legs felt like lead as I walked down the hall, each step echoing unnaturally in the sudden quiet of the office. Sarah followed, her hand hovering near my arm as if afraid to touch me.

The door to Mr. Davies’ office was closed. I reached out, my fingers trembling, and turned the knob. The door swung inward with a soft click, revealing a room identical to how we’d left it last week. His desk was immaculate, papers neatly stacked, a framed photo of his family smiling back at us. And the phone was there, ringing, a clear, insistent tone in the otherwise empty space.

I took a deep breath and reached for the phone. As I lifted the receiver, the ringing stopped. A voice crackled on the other end. It was Mr. Davies, sounding exactly as he did in the news clip, calm, controlled, and unsettlingly friendly. “Hello?” he said. “Is anyone there?”

My voice caught in my throat. I managed a weak, “Mr. Davies? Is… is that you?”

“Yes,” he replied. “Who am I speaking with?”

Before I could answer, Sarah gasped and pointed toward the computer screen on his desk. The screen had just lit up. A video conference was loading. The image slowly came into focus, revealing Mr. Davies, alive and well, sitting in what looked like a sleek office, surrounded by high-tech equipment. Behind him, a sign read “InnovateTech, Phoenix, AZ.”

He looked at the camera, his unsettling smile wider than usual. “Ah, there you are,” he said, his voice perfectly modulated. “I was wondering who answered the phone. I’m having a little trouble here, a temporary… situation, you could say. I need your help.”

He continued, “There seems to have been a slight… displacement. A glitch in the system, you see. Something went wrong with the… transfer. You are the closest. Can you take the flash drive off my desk. The one labelled “Project Chimera.” Put it in the shredder.”

He paused, his eyes fixed on us through the screen. “And, most importantly, whatever you do, do not tell anyone about this. Ever. Understood?”

Then, the video froze. The screen went blank. The phone line went dead.

Sarah and I looked at each other, the weight of the impossible crushing us. Then, I picked up the flash drive, placed it in the shredder and activated it, feeling like a ghost of my old self. I looked out the window. The city outside, the world, continued its normal routine, but the sky looked different now, darker, filled with an unknown possibility. And in the silence of the office, only the echoes of a dying dream remained.