Behind the Yellow Door
The truth is behind the yellow door.
It was the one line in the will no one could make sense of. There was no yellow door associated with Hector Rawlins or his family. Eventually, solicitors and those involved in the probating chalked it up to a glimmer of the dementia Hector had nearly avoided in his final months. By the funeral, everyone had forgotten their curiosity.
Hector had loved puzzles – jigsaws in particular. He had collected them as most others collected books or stamps, custom shelves filling his entire study, with his favourite and most impressive accomplishments hung throughout the house.
One such honoured piece was in the dining room, taking pride of place on the wall and luring the eye to the vibrant colours of a cliffside town somewhere along the Mediterranean. It was only fifteen hundred pieces – child’s play by Hector’s standards – but he had completed it over a significant weekend with his three children, then young enough to enjoy sitting by their father for hours poring over a task they didn’t truly appreciate. What it lacked in puzzle-solving prestige it gained in sentimental merit, earning it the prominent home overlooking the dinner table. Hector’s children had grown up under its variegated gaze, sometimes gazing idly upon it, occasionally indulging in the fond but fading memory of its creation.
The nostalgia of fresh grief brought its significance back to them and, the morning after the funeral, after sleeping together under their parents’ roof for the first time in years, Michael, the eldest, suggested they break it apart and reassemble it in their father’s honour. Carrie and Sid agreed and before long they had the edges complete and the pieces organised by shape and colour, as Hector had taught them.
“I swear this was easier when we were kids,” Sid grumbled, searching vainly for the bow of a boat.
“We had Dad then,” Michael said softly, that same sad little smile he’d been wearing since Wednesday still sitting primly above his chin. “He made it easier.”
Carrie snorted, shaking her head fondly. “It was easier because he did all the work and we only pushed the pieces into place when he’d found them. We weren’t exactly helpful.”
“I got a few pieces myself,” Sid said. Carrie shot him a look of patient indulgence she was lucky he didn’t see.
Carrie half-stood, craning her neck to peer over the militant lines of waiting colour. She’d taken it upon herself to complete the first row of houses with as little help as possible – a common theme in her life and one undoubtedly born of being the middle child.
“Remember that black one he did?” Sid asked as she selected a piece and sat back down. “The one that was about two thousand pieces?”
The other two nodded, eyebrows raised in remembered strife.
“I think that took him the longest,” Sid continued.
“No, that crucible one took the longest,” Michael said.
“Krypt,” Carrie corrected, staring at the empty spaces, idly turning the puzzle piece in her fingers.
“Whatever. That one took him over a week.”
Sid said something snarky, but Carrie’s attention was being lulled by the smooth curves of the piece twirling slowly in her fingertips, eyes trekking automatically over the jigsaw as she hunted down its spot. An unexpected texture drew her gaze to the back of the piece. The soft blue card had been cut and glued back into place. Frowning, she dug her freshly varnished nails into the tiny groove, black paint hindering the grip. The thin wedge of card broke free, a micro SD card following.
Carrie blinked. Her brothers’ bickering faded as she held it up.
“What is this?”
It took them twenty minutes to open it on Sid’s computer. They’d found an adapter in Hector’s old digital camera, already dusty in his office. It contained one file, an mp4 without a title, dated two weeks after their mother had died. Had their father bothered with a name, they might have had some hint as to the horrors waiting for them. But, being children of a master puzzler, naive in their rose-tinted grief, all three assumed this would be one final mystery from their father. One last intelligent scheme, a final farewell through his favourite, convoluted language.
They were half right.
Sid clicked the video into full screen and hit play.
Their father sat on the screen, not at his desk, where he’d spent most of his life, but at the very table at which they sat. A bottle of whiskey stood half-empty at his elbow, a full tumbler in his hand. His eyes were unfamiliar, dark and pinched. His voice, usually so eloquent and measured, was low and rough, as though he’d been talking (or screaming) for hours. He was younger by over a decade but didn’t look it, the heaviness in his eyes squatting on his crow’s feet, dragging shadows into his skin.
Carrie bit her lip as her grief beat against her chest, reaching for her brothers’ shoulders and drawing them closer. It was a mark of the last few days that they allowed the contact.
Hector took four long swallows of his whiskey before deigning to look into the camera. When he spoke, his voice was gravelly and alien with an odd emotion Carrie couldn’t place.
“Anna died last week,” he said, his mouth turning down at the sides, an antithesis to its usual orientation. “And I’ve realised … it’s different for a lot of reasons now, but of all the things I miss about her ...” He shook his head and knocked back another hefty gulp. “No one knows now. Anna knew. It made it better. I want someone to know.”
He shifted his weight. His children exchanged baffled glances.
“Twenty years ago, a man named Jason Everritt went missing. Trail went cold. Cops gave up. His widow lives in the next town over. I’ve seen her in the market a few times. They have two kids, few years younger than mine. He was a banker.”
Hector tipped more amber into his glass and threw half of it back, grimacing around the burn.
“I killed him.”
The silence of curious attention shifted instantly to an icy disbelief. Sid’s hand hovered over the trackpad, as though half-wanting to rewind and make sure he hadn’t misheard.
Hector took another drink. Shifted in the chair his youngest now sat in. He didn’t make eye contact with his children as he continued.
“He was the first. Buried the deepest. What’s left of him, I mean. But there were more. Fourteen, I think? Over twenty years. And yes, they’re all in the same place. Roughly. Anna knew. But she didn’t want the kids growing up without a dad so I had to endure twenty bloody years of threats and hints and digs and questions.” He sniffed, blinking quickly. The corner of his mouth twitched ruefully. “It was a game between us, really. One I kept winning. Long as I kept the kids happy, she didn’t care.”
Hector’s smile grew and for a moment he looked like the father they had buried, eyes crinkling in affection, his most well-worn expression overtaking his features.
“Not that it was hard. I love my kids. I bet some of you’ll find that hard to believe, but I do. And I’m proud of them. They’ve made something of themselves. They’re happy. I gave them a good life, and they love me.” He set the tumbler down and leaned on his elbows, fixing his children with a subtle smile that warped the familiar face into that of a stranger. “We get a bad press, serial killers. People think we’re not capable of love, but that’s just a lie they tell themselves to convince them we’re different, other, a separate thing, a disease. Well. The only difference between me and all those people who watch those true crime shows is I’ve got the balls to act on that curiosity. That urge.”
Michael reached over Sid and slapped the spacebar, silencing the relish in their father’s tone. The image froze, that stranger’s smile searing out from the screen.
“This is a joke,” he said, getting to his feet and kicking the chair away. He ran his hands through his curls, leaving them clenched at his neck before turning back to his silent siblings. “This is a joke!” he repeated, louder, as though that would make it true. “We keep watching and it’s gonna be some mad murder mystery crap, some puzzle he’s made to mess with us.”
Carrie leaned back in her chair, one hand at her stomach.
“I don’t think so, Mike,” she said softly, still staring at her father’s alien image.
Sid laughed, drowning out Michael’s growl.
“No way,” he said, shaking his head and smiling with the air of one cataloguing the bizarreness of a moment for future anecdotes. “Michael’s right. This is a hoax. Just a game. Dad’s not – Dad wasn’t – come on.”
“Play it,” Carrie said, using her Mum tone. Neither brother moved to hit play. Carrie stabbed it herself.
There were four and a half minutes left of the recording. Any hope of denial died by the second. There were too many details. Too much satisfaction in Hector’s tone. Too much truth in that new smile that was ruining a face each of them had loved unquestioningly their entire lives. By the time the video ended, one reality had been murdered. In its place another was forming out of horror and disgust, and a deep, aching terror.
Hector Rawlins had murdered fourteen people. The first that same weekend they had assembled the jigsaw now abandoned on the table. The last only two years before their mother died – right when they’d found out about the cancer.
There weren’t words for what they were experiencing, so they sat in silence for an hour as the betrayal burned and curdled in their hearts. The next hour was largely dominated by shouting. Spirits were found. One glass shattered against the wall. The laptop lay on the floor, screen cracked, the image of their father gone. He still smiled down at them from framed photographs hanging on the far wall, along with their mother. Their mother. Their mother who had known, who had accepted, who had let them grow up with a murderer.
Everything they had known was undone. A lie. How could their parents love them yet rip apart other families? How could they chide them for their mistakes when they wilfully hid the worst sins? How could the three of them consider themselves good people when their parents had been … what they had been?
Eventually, the words came.
“We have to turn this in,” Carrie said, her voice hoarse, hollow. Uncertain.
Michael shook his head. “No. No way. We can’t.”
“We have to, Mikey.”
“No. Do you know what that’ll do? What it’ll do to us? To our families?” He heaved a censoring sigh. “You want to explain to Matty and Sandra how their grandad killed people just because he liked it?”
Carrie closed her eyes, pursing her lips. Sid dug his fingers into his beard, scratching harder than was kind.
“The families,” he said. “They don’t know what happened to them.”
“Then they still have hope!” Michael snapped. “They can still pretend they’re out there somewhere, alive. Happy. We turn this in and that’s gone.”
Carrie shook her head. “You’re a coward, Mikey.”
Michael rounded on her. “Say that again! Say that to my face!”
She met his fiery gaze with one of ice.
“You are a coward.”
The word hung between them like a bad idea, unavoidable and lasting.
“He wasn’t a monster,” Michael whispered, hands fists at his sides. “He was our dad. He read us stories and helped us with homework and listened to our problems and –”
“Killed people?” Sid finished, fingers still scoring his jaw.
Michael shook his head, turning in an agitated circle.
“No. No. That’s not ... that’s not all he was.”
“Does it matter?” Carrie asked. “Does it matter what else he was? Fourteen people, Mike. That’s an entire rugby team. Plus the coach. You know how many people that affects? How many grieving? How many –”
“I get it,” he hissed, not looking at her.
She waited a moment for the venom to fade from the air.
“Then you agree. We turn this in. Face what follows.” She swallowed flashes of a future she didn’t want to have, didn’t want her children to have.
Carrie didn’t notice Sid pick up the laptop. Her eyes were on Michael, stalking from table to kitchen counter and back like a tiger itching to reach through its cage and maul someone.
The clacking of keys interrupted their tension.
“What are you doing?”
Sid didn’t look up.
“Deleting the video.”
Carrie stood. Michael stilled.
“I’m deleting the video and we’re going to burn the damn puzzle and we’re going to forget tonight ever happened.”
“Sid!” Carrie near-shouted, “we can’t –!”
Side cut her off with a scowl that reminded her of Hector. His voice was older than it should be.
“We’re not going to let this destroy your kids’ lives. And ours. No one’s looking for the victims. No one knows there’s a connection. We contact the families, even anonymously, and someone’s going to figure it out and our lives will be over. What does it matter, anyway? Dad’s dead. No one’s found the bodies. This doesn’t have to ruin everything,” he added, voice softer now, persuasive. Michael nodded, relief erasing years from his face. Carrie bit her lip.
“It’s wrong,” she whispered, wishing she believed it enough. Wishing she was brave enough.
“I know. But it protects us. Protects the kids. So we’re doing it.”
Sid clicked on the file. No one stopped him deleting it.
They didn’t speak as they swept the irregular shards of an Italian coast into a black bin bag. Michael tied it shut and left without a word, driving into town to stuff it into a public bin. Sid tried to think of something bracing to tell his sister, but he’d never been that good with words.
Carrie left last. She sat in the car outside her house for an hour before she dug the hollowed piece out of her pocket. It was disconcertingly beautiful. Bright stone and a red fence, a scrap of floral ivy.
And a yellow door.
Aoife Doyle is an Irish author living in Dublin with a BA in English & Film from University College Dublin who embraces their passion for Irish Mythology and Folklore to bring life and mischief to their fantasies in children's literature. They have won several novel-writing competitions and has been writing short stories for over ten years. When not delving into worldbuilding and magic systems, Aoife loves having adventures along the Wild Atlantic Way in their noble Yaris steed, Rua.