This last thought worried me, but it seemed unlikely at first. And when I woke up on Tuesday with no change in the decorations, I was actually a bit disappointed. I even texted my sister and told her that I thought the phantom decorator might be done.

I had to go by the grocery store that night, so it was well after dark before I got home. When I did, I saw a third reindeer and a small pair of what I supposed were meant to be carolers were sitting at the bottom of my steps. At first I felt a little happy thrill of excitement, and I grinned as I noticed that the other two reindeer and the snowman had made their way closer in as well. But my smile faltered when I saw the front of the carolers.

Just like the older decorations, they were of well-kept but ancient-looking plastic, and based on their height and the shape of their plastic “hair”, I assumed they were meant to be a small boy and girl. But it was hard to be sure because their faces were gone.

I don’t mean they were like some decorations where the face has no features by design. This was like someone had taken a hot iron to them. In the place of a nose and eyes and singing mouth were tangled mounds of rough, melted plastic.

That’s when I called the police.

As you might expect, that amounted to very little. I couldn’t really blame them. It looked like a vaguely creepy prank of some kind, and they said there hadn’t been any similar pranks reported this year. They promised to touch base with my closest neighbors just to see if anyone heard or saw anything, and one of the officers assured me that just having them ask around would likely spook whoever was doing it enough that it might very well stop.

The next morning, when I sleep-stumbled into the kitchen to make coffee, I froze. Sitting on my kitchen table was a gingerbread house. It looked as though it had been sprayed with some kind of sealant at some point in the past, and while it didn’t look nearly as old as the yard decorations, the translucent film coating every surface of it was run through with cracks and yellowed like an old man’s toenails. And underneath the film, exploiting all the wounds in the protective seal, were the house’s inhabitants.

Tiny roaches. Worms. Other small specks of hungry movement that roamed across the sugary snow-topped roof and bit little holes through the candy window panes. I could faintly smell a dry rotting odor coming from the gingerbread house, but it was a combination of that endless movement and the sour pang of fear in my belly that made me dry retch into the sink several times before I was able to call 911 again.

****