About a month and a half before Halloween we got a new neighbor. The woman is straight out of the 50’s housewife shows and the man is strange and his jokes are only funny to him. They have no children and no pets, well except for the raccoon that is always coming from their yard to get our garbage.

Halloween is a big thing in our town. There is a decorating competition and the winner gets gift cards to all the good hardware and craft stores. My other neighbor Mr. Vlad he is from Germany and moved here to get away from the hate and violence in the 70’s and 80’s. He always wins the decorating competition and he usually shares his winnings with everyone on the street.

Vlad will start decorating on September 1st always adding until the big reveal on Halloween. Every year he bases it on the latest horror movie that is all the rage. I love living so close to his house on Halloween because he hands out the best candy and there is always a line to get to his house. This year the decorating hasn’t begun and it is already the 5th of September. Come to think of it I hadn’t seen Vlad since August, the same month the for sale sign in the neighbors yard was changed to sold. We are not close like that that I could just stop by and check in on him so I haven’t been by to check on him.

My mom said he had a daughter in Florida or California and maybe he was visiting her for the winter who knows. The new neighbors finally moved in about a week ago and already they are decorating the outside with decorations for Halloween. When I noticed the first decorations and still none in Vlad’s yard I got really worried. Vlad would not let this go unanswered would he? In the new neighbors yard was two corpses hanging from the tree a man and a woman but they had masks on over grain sacks on their heads. They appeared seemingly over night. There were tombstones with all the neighbors names in the yard and now there were more skeletons but you could tell they weren’t really, but the two people hanging you could not tell. The blood looked all too real as well.

It is now October 1st and still no Vlad and no decorations. Our mail lady had also taken a sudden leave of absence from work and was said to be in Texas with her son. There was a funny foul smell coming from the neighbors tree, it was like rotten garbage but more than that. There was a funny black tar like goo coming out of the bodies hanging in the tree. The neighbors had invited the whole block to help them burn the two bodies and make s’mores after Halloween because they came from England and on Guy Fawkes night you burn an effigy of Guy Fawkes and light off fireworks and have a bonfire. All of us kids were excited another night to have s’mores and fireworks we were all in, but I was sad that Vlad would miss this.

November 5th arrived and the neighbors had a huge bonfire already going when the sun went down, there were tons of marshmallows and chocolate you could make hundreds of s’mores. We were all there the whole neighborhood, the neighbors, who we now know as Margie and Ryan Ton, brought the two bodies from the tree and we all cheered as they threw them on the bonfire. As the man’s body burned I was caught by surprise as I glimpsed the face. It was Vlad. I had to tell someone but no one would believe me so what was I to do? I need to tell someone. The sheriff he’s here I’ll go tell him.

Well that was a waste of time he just laughed and told me I was imaging things and to go make some s’mores. Those s’mores were poison to me now, I will expose this couple for who and what they are for Vlad.