Before that Halloween, I couldn't imagine my neighbor Ian Gibson being someone any neighbor would feel they couldn't turn their back on. He looked like a conventionally handsome man with no distinguishing features except maybe a slightly stronger chin than most. He worked at City Hospital as a nurse. He also did some volunteer work at the local domestic abuse shelter, though he didn't make a very big deal of it any time I asked him about it.

The man wasn't a plaster saint either or even a particularly self-righteous type. He was happy to tell edgy jokes at a parties when he was among exclusively good friends, guy got himself in trouble a couple times gambling, and I saw his car outside a strip club when I was driving by a couple times, and I know that means there were plenty of other times he was there I never found out about. But that's the worst I could say about the man, and none of it dropped him below average. Particularly for someone that as far as I knew was happy being a lifelong bachelor.

Then last Halloween rolled around.

My wife Tasha and I had set up our decorations with her usual vigor. It put it into sharper relief that his house, across the street and the nearest other one in our out-of-the-way suburb, was completely undecorated. Not that Tasha was a horror buff: It was more quaint autumnal decorations, the most horrifying of which was a scarecrow that would have been appropriate in an elementary school.

I knew the decorations wouldn't matter much on Halloween night itself. The closest house with a child was a block away, and at that point, they would go downtown to the grocery store for their Halloween party instead of walking the streets. So forget trick-or-treaters, there were often hours between passing cars in the evenings on that street. The most active it got was when I and Mr. Gibson took out our trash and recycling at the same time. We both gave each other nods in the dark blue evening light as we positioned our bins on the curb but otherwise we didn't even pause to exchange pleasantries.

I came back inside to see Tasha sneaking a piece of candy from the bowl which we left next to the door out of tradition.

"Busted," I chided.

"Someone should have some," she said. She was in her bath robe and her hair was in a towel. It's a time I've rerun in my head so often that I can even remember the heat from a fresh shower emanating from her.

"You know what that means, Sweetie," I said. After taking a few pieces for myself, I took a chair from the dining room and stood on it so that I could place the candy out of easy, snacking reach.

I know it sounds weird, but we both have a severe sweettooth. If we didn't make ourselves work for it, we'd probably tear through that bowl in a few days.

"I'm gonna watch some TV. You have anything in mind?" Tasha asked while getting a glass of water.

"Yeah, bed." I said carrying the chair back out to the dining room. "I don't know if it's just part of getting old, but I am crashing hard. Good night."

"I'll keep it down then. Night, Honey."

I didn't hear any sounds of a passing vehicle or anything as I drifted off. When I woke up it was about seven thirty. It was just late enough that the sunlight was bright and I know from weather reports it had been unseasonably warm all night. Tasha was still fast asleep, so I took a shower and popped some bacon in the microwave before I heard the garbage truck arrive outside. I decided to go retrieve the bins because if Tasha or I put it off on Tuesday that usually meant we didn't bring them in until at least Wednesday.

Opening the front door I was immediately hit with the smell of decaying meat. The front door of my home is positioned behind a wall, so I had to run out a few steps before I could see anything. I had time to imagine that maybe some animal had come from the nearby woods, knocked over our garbage bin, and spread trash all over the yard.

Even after I could see into the wider world, it took me a couple seconds to understand what I was seeing, and a couple more to sufficiently accept it. The realization stopped me dead. I found it almost impossible to describe in detail, and I never wish to do so again. Hopefully all I have to say is that around Ian Gibson's house, parts of people were hung from nails that were usually used for Christmas lights. Remains were spread around a portion of his lawn near a small flower garden. Worst of all in its own way was the front porch. There I could clearly see practically a coat of dried blood from which trails of the substance branched off in every direction, particularly back up into the house.

I tried to tell myself that this was just a Halloween tableau. One far more extreme and distasteful than anyone as sane as Ian Gibson had seemed would be likely to put up, especially after there would be no trick or treaters to see it. My gut feeling quickly rejected that. I had smelled decaying human tissue before I suspected anything was amiss, so it wasn't just my imagination. Plus looking at the pile of remains for a moment, I saw flies buzzing around it. On one of the limbs I saw a floral pattern with flower blossoms adorning it, a detail which at that time felt like something an artist manufacturing props would never think to include. As I accepted that it was real, I looked away while putting my hands over my eyes, and the back of my mouth filled with bile for a moment.

I uncovered my eyes when I heard a scream, the kind of raspy scream that would have come from Gibson's aged neighbor. I looked up and saw that she was in her front yard. Then I saw that she wasn't screaming at the tableau. It was because Gibson was out in front of his house. He was wearing the same clothing from last night, and the front of his shirt and pants had been splattered with blood that was long-dried. He was approaching me with purpose, his left hand extended. He didn't have a weapon that I saw and his body language wasn't overtly threatening despite the blood, but I ran back inside almost immediately.

I locked the door, ran to the back door to check it was locked, then ran to bedroom where my phone was charging.

"What happened?" Tasha asked, barely awake.

"Ian must have killed someone," I said dialling 911.

"Ian? What?!" I didn't feel there was time to answer because the dispatcher had answered my call. I gave the dispatcher my address, and then gave an extremely mild version of what I had seen. By the time I finished, I looked over at Tasha and she seemed to have been completely awakened by what I had done. When I saw that I felt a sudden sense of disconnect from what I had seen outside. It was a crime to call emergency services for nothing, and I felt a wave of subconscious fear that I had called the police over a ridiculous misunderstanding. God knew we were in no position to pay a fine just then.

Then the doorbell rang. Neither Tasha nor I moved. There was a loud banging on the door.

"Tasha! Scott?! It's me, Ian!" he yelled. We were statues. "What you saw-- Scott, you got it all... I was just..." Tasha got up slowly, as if Ian were in the room with us and she thought she could sneak up on him.

"It's not what it looks like, it's... Ah, forget it." He said. Tasha walked into the room which we had picked out for a nursery, the closest one with a window that looked out at the street. I heard that raspy scream again.

"Don't look out there," I tried to warn her. Tasha hesitated.

"I have to," she said. I wasn't about to struggle with her and maybe on some level I wanted her to be the one who checked on whether Ian's neighbor was safe. Tasha shuddered when she saw it, but she didn't look away.

"Is he still there?" I asked after a moment.

"Yes," Tasha said.

"Is his neighbor safe?"

"She must have run inside." I could hear a tremble in her voice. "He's, he's just sitting on the curb, looking down."

We didn't have the stomach to look outside again until we heard a police siren. I must have felt some sense it was my turn to look, and when I did, I held up a hand to obscure the sight of the remains in his yard to watch Gibson and the police. The officers gaped at the remains as I had for a moment, but then they seemed to snap out of it quickly and arrested him. From what I could see from that window, Gibson was quite belligerent with them as they put him in cuffs. I'm sure I heard him yell "What is wrong with you?" through the closed window. I must admit I was a little pleased to see that they were a bit rough in putting him in the backseat.

Almost immediately after he was driven away Tasha and I calmed down. I called in sick, having no trouble convincing my boss that I wasn't feeling very well. The police knocked at our door. I was able to give a statement with Tasha's support, and she had less trouble giving hers. I was even able to look out the window a few times after Crime Scene Investigations arrived and collected the remains from the scene, performing what looked like DNA tests on the site. It looked like the authorities had everything completely under control.

By the time night came around, Tasha and I both told each other that we were surprised how normal things felt again. Part of the natural human coping process, I guess. We couldn't afford a therapist, but we agreed that we would talk about what we'd seen for years if we had to. I had visions that we certainly would, if only from the massive number of interviews. By the time Ian Gibson went to jail, he would certainly be as famous as Ed Gein, and like many people that lived next to new celebrities, we had to expect our privacy to go out the window, at least for awhile. But the last thing we were going to do would be to let this destroy us. If we could look at something so nightmarish and keep it together, then there was nothing that we couldn't do.

At the time, the news cycle was so dominated with coverage of the election that the story stayed local news. Neither of us were even quoted in the newspaper. At work, during my break, I got curious enough that I called the police enquiring after it. The officer who answered the phone very politely told me that there was very little information that could be released to the public. I thanked him. Then called him again at the end of the shift. Same officer answered, and he was still polite. I had been one of the witnesses, after all. It was the only polite thing he could do.

We had our first interview that day when a local news van stopped by. I didn't recognize the reporter, but it was a little bit surreal to have a news camera in my face while I answered questions. They were surprisingly sanitary questions, too. I guess the news program didn't want to come across as yellow journalists. Something that amused me in the moment was that Tasha arrived while I was being interviewed, but she merely parked her car in our neighbor's parking lot until the news van left.

"I wasn't in the mood to talk to the press," she said as she came in. Then she forced a smirk. "At least, not for free." We talked about it over some television. I mentioned calling the police twice. She said that they probably got those kinds of phone calls all the time, but that I had to limit myself. I agreed.

The next day I only called the police once. I told Tasha about it. She said it was odd that there was nothing new after two days, but it was a rather remarkable case, so we should expect there to be some odd aspects to it.

The day after I called the police twice. I told Tasha I called them once. The day after that I had off, so I gave her my phone to keep from calling them. Which meant I spent the whole day thinking about calling them. And when I was preparing dinner, I overheard that Tasha was calling them.

It was over the course of the next three weeks that the officer went from being polite to us to being slightly flippant, to being utterly sick of us, to seeming to accept our phone calls as a fact of life. And bear in mind, he wasn't the only officer who took our calls. But on the twenty-third day, it changed completely. For one thing, he initiated the call.

"Hello?" I said answering the call while driving. I could hardly fail to recognize his voice by then.

"Are you driving?" he asked.

"Uh, no," I told him since it's not legal to talk on a cell phone while driving in our state.

"Park somewhere," he told me. I complied, choosing a nearby Walmart parking lot.

"So, he's confessed?" I ventured. Even as insane as he clearly was, it was surprising Ian Gibson had been willing to stick to a claim he was innocent after weeks in a cell.

"They're talking about releasing him." I was too shocked to even express disbelief. "It's the DNA tests. There were no heads or hands in those remains, so they needed to test them to identify the victims. But they did not identify anyone. In fact, the results came back that it wasn't even human tissue."

"That's..." I couldn't even finish the sentence.

"I was there, sir. I smelled the remains, I collected some of it. I knew it was organic matter. The labs are saying that they even found maggots that had eaten their way into it. But according to their results, parts of it are foam, parts are latex, and so on."

"Then have it retested!" I said, half ordering and half pleading as if the decision rested entirely in the officer's hands.

"That's the problem, sir. They had it retested at a different lab. Then they had it retested again. Then again. And then again. That's why it's taken us weeks: It's usually a three day procedure. There was plenty of material to work with."

"You're lying, this isn't funny. I'm sorry I bothered you with all those calls!" I said. He didn't bother to reassure me he wasn't joking.

"Now, from square one, Ian Gibson contended that it was only a Halloween display and he was completely innocent. With five labs worth of lab results backing him up, the DA is guaranteed not to want to touch this case. Hell, there's some talk of trying to bury it because otherwise it might compromise some DNA-based convictions if so many labs are getting results like these. Gibson has said that he's not going to press charges against anyone, he only wants this all to be over so he can get on with his life." As I listened, stretching out in front of me was an empty field. I had visions of my remains lying out there, or maybe being buried out there. Gibson was standing over them, nodding at me as he had on the last night I saw him.

"This can't be happening."

"I didn't think so either. Those lab results can say what they want, I know what we collected from his yard. If you think what you saw in his front yard was bad, you can thank God you never saw the back. I don't know what he could have done to throw off the lab results, but that was flesh and bone. If he gets released, well, you and your wife needed to know about it to make plans. He mentioned your name while in custody, and he wasn't happy. You'll be first to know if he gets let out."

"No," I whimpered at him. I admit it, I whimpered.

I knew it wouldn't be safe for me to drive home. I called Tasha and asked her to pick me up. I didn't tell her why I needed to be picked up until we were in our living room. She took it slightly worse than I did.

Hope sprung eternal, though, and our debts were enough that we spent the night at home, and we even went back to work the next day. It was two more days before we got the call that he was going to be released.

We were out of town, visiting relatives by the time the police could have dropped him off at home. Her in-laws were pleasant enough despite the short notice. I noticed that even though we were only a couple counties over, there was no coverage of his crime or his release in the local newspaper or on television. Probably didn't want to get sued for fear of damaging his reputation.

I kept in touch with the police and friends in town over the following weeks As little legal grounds as there was for believing it, every officer and investigator knew the truth, and their word carried weight. Gibson could show his face, but his social life was completely ruined in town. His next door neighbor kept a gun and an eye on him and doubled security in her house, and said she saw him leave his house much less often.

This need to keep in touch with the people in town was why I answered the worst call I ever received. Tasha and I were trying to get lost in a Netflix movie and I reflexively answered the phone.

"Tell you what," Ian Gibson's voice came over the phone in a pleasant tone. "I'll show you how I did it next Halloween." I heard him hang up. I haven't heard from him in the months since.

He might have just been saying that to get back at me. I don't know how he could possibly know where we are right now, and he hasn't been in touch with us for months. But as Tasha told me one night when I found her sitting up at three in the morning staring out the window of her parent's living room, he's clearly shown that he can do things we wouldn't have thought were possible.

And Halloween is coming up quickly.