THE SIX: A Dark, Dazzling Serial Killer Story

by Anni Taylor

  I rarely saw Daddy James and Mom kissing. Just a peck on the cheek. Not real kissing.

  Everyone was gathering around. Trying to make sense of everything they’d just seen and been through.

  But everything that happens is filtered through people’s minds. And no one can make sense of someone else’s mind. Not really. Unless you can walk inside and see the framework and walls and halls and rooms of memory, you’ll never really know.

  Cormack reached me first. His arms went around me.

  His arms felt like walls, except walls of flesh and blood and warmth.

  I sensed his mind marked and stained by the sight of me pushing a knife into Daddy James.

  A sharp, unexpected night wind blowing down on the dandelions.

  “Kara,” he said quietly. “It’s time to go.”

  83. EVIE

  THE ISLAND BECAME A DARK SMUDGE against the sky as the Coast Guard boat headed back out to sea. I kept watching, needing to witness the moment when the island vanished altogether.

  Commander Liourdis had requested that we not tell him our stories yet. He said he couldn’t determine what was truth or fiction, and I didn’t blame him. He’d called for Hellenic Coast Guard patrols and the Hellenic Police to head out to the island and investigate.

  I didn’t know whether the guards and police would find Poppy dead or alive when they got there. A dark part of me hoped that she’d live and be put away in jail the rest of her life. She’d be mourning the loss of the man she loved—Brother Vito—for a long time, just like she’d made so many others suffer the loss of loved ones. She deserved to know pain.

  Constance stood on the deck with her daughter, holding her as though she was terrified that if she let go, Kara would be gone forever. Kara stared out to the island, her expression blank, frozen.

  Richard and Cormack leaned on the boat’s railing, Richard gazing up at the sky, Cormack casting quick glances in Kara’s direction. I caught Kara stealing a return look.

  The others were still having cuts tended to.

  The lives of Jennifer Bloom and James Lundquist were on tenterhooks. Both had lost a lot of blood. I prayed if only one of them were to live, then that person would be Jennifer. I’d last seen Sethi by Jennifer’s side, with his forehead bent down to her chest and his shoulders hitching as he sobbed. She hadn’t regained consciousness.

  I was both terrified of someone as dangerous as James living and terrified of him dying. If he died, all his knowledge about the membership of Yeqon’s Saviours would be gone. As their leader, he’d know more than anyone. There might well be more of the Saviours who didn’t come to the island for the challenges due to illness or whatever else. And the few that had been left alive on the island might be sailing away right now. My stomach twisted at the thought of Saviours being out there in the world, ready to rebuild that cult of evil.

  A bandaged Gray emerged from the interior of the ship. Moving behind me, he locked his arms around my shoulders and kissed my temple.

  A tremor passed through my body as I moved around to face him. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Better than new.” The familiar creases appeared at the outer edges of his eyes as he smiled. The handsome face that had grown pale during the Sydney winter had suddenly become sun browned under the Mediterranean sun. He had a week’s growth of light-brown stubble, which I’d never seen him with before. And he’d dyed his blonde hair dark. He was a different man than I’d known. Had this whole insane thing changed him, or had this always been the man inside Gray? I didn’t know. I didn’t deserve either version of Gray. I was still having trouble processing Gray even being here.

  “How am I ever going to explain myself and what I did to our daughters?” My voice was paper thin in between the sound of the boat’s motor and the ocean.

  “C’mon, Evie,” he said gently. “They’re too young to be told much at all. All they need to know is that Mummy wasn’t well and she went away to get better. And now she’s back.”

  “I can’t tell them that forever. When they’re older, they’ll find out everything. If people don’t tell them, they’ll find out themselves online. Even now, kids will be taunting Willow over what they see on TV about me.”

  “We’ll go away. Start again somewhere else. Somewhere where they have little, cheap beach houses near the ocean. I know you’d like that.”

  Tears stung my eyes before the wind whipped them dry again. “Really? But your job . . .?”

  “Job’s gone. I’ll explain later. We’ll head to a small town and raise the kids doing the things you and Ben did on your family holidays.”

  “We can’t do it. There’s no work in those places. And . . . it’d be better for you and the girls if I wasn’t even in the picture. I haven’t done a good job of being a wife and mother. I’m not built for it. There’s something wrong with me. What I did . . .”

  A silence stretched between us as my voice fell away.

  Gray exhaled a long, soft breath. “Willow and Lilly are desperate to have you back. Lilly’s been sick. She was in the hospital for a while—”

  “In hospital? Why? What happened?”

  “Nothing happened. It’s just . . . Lilly. She’s okay, but she has a condition. She’s always had it.”

  “Gray, tell me. What is it?”

  “I don’t understand everything about it myself yet. When we get back, we’ll talk to the doctors again, and we’ll find out together.”

  He held me then as I cried.

  Stroking my hair, he pressed his cheek to mine. “I’m desperate to have you home again, too. That’s why I’m here.”

  Unable to answer, I shook my head. Turning, I looked out to sea.

  “You almost died,” I said after a moment. “I have to live with myself knowing that. I half think I’m still there, trapped in that cellar, and I’ve gone crazy. Imagining you and everything that happened afterwards.”

  The island became a speck, then it slipped from view, a thing only in nightmares.

  Gray’s heartbeat was a tattoo against my back—or at least, I imagined I could feel it.

  The sun glinting on the ocean and the breeze whipping past me couldn’t erase the images of the cellar or take away the incessant echo of the metronomes.

  My head hurt. Pounding. A thick, disorienting cloud hazing my brain.

  I let my eyes close.

  In shock, I felt myself pulled straight back to the cellar. The heavy weight of the chains. The stone wall against my back. Whispers and whimpers and choked pleas in my ears. The foul, coppery odours of death.

  Gasping, I struggled to find the breath in my lungs that wasn’t there.

  Open your eyes, Evie.

  Open your eyes.

  EPILOGUE

  ONE MONTH LATER

  TWO LITTLE GIRLS STOOD ON THE shore, hand in hand. Silhouetted before the deep pink and orange sunset, waving goodbye to the sun.

  They’d call the sun back again in the morning, racing down to the sand with buckets and spades. Everything certain and forever in their world.

  If I looked past them, I could almost see my brother bodysurfing in the curling waves, making the most of the fading light, never wanting to come in. And Dad walking along the shore with his fishing rod, coming back to make us dinner with what he’d caught. Only, it was winter now, and that picture was all wrong.

  Gray sat beside me on the edge of the deck. “No wonder your parents kept coming back here. Perfect spot.” He handed me a hot coffee.

  “Thanks.” I leaned against his shoulder, watching Willow and Lilly chase each other across the sand.

  It really was a great spot. I’d been amazed that this holiday house was still here, the furniture and pictures on the walls the same as I remembered. My mother had rented it for us this time, insisting that Gray and I come and stay here. She was somehow different, but in another way exactly the same. If I wanted Willow and Lilly to have a relationship with her, I was going to have to bite the bullet and just accept that she was always going
to have a prickly personality. Maybe. I was undecided and all I could do was to take it one day at a time with her.

  Gray and I had only been back in Sydney for two days before we’d come here. We’d stepped from the hot summer in Greece to the cold Sydney winter. I was glad to be away from my street and from people who knew us. We’d been kept overseas for almost a month while the authorities untangled the story of the monastery. Finally, they let us go.

  James Lundquist had come close to dying on the coast guard boat that had brought us all back to the mainland of Greece. But he’d hung on, probably using the same tenacity that he’d used to lead his flock of Saviours. He’d protested his innocence until too much evidence was stacked against him. Then he’d fallen into a cold, terrifying silence and he’d been locked away.

  Poppy, too, had lived. I only saw her once more, when I had to point her out in her hospital bed as being a member of the Saviours. I wasn’t able to read her expression when she stared back at me, but then, I couldn’t expect to understand her mind. She’d seemed so warm and friendly but she’d been able to conceal her true self well.

  The Hellenic Coast Guard and special police units managed to gather up a few more of the Saviours from the island, but not many. Most had died, a few escaping on boats.

  Jennifer Bloom, after three weeks in a coma, had opened her eyes to find Sethi, Petrina and Rico at her bedside. Her long endeavour to find out what had happened to her brother and to expose the Saviours was over. I’d been to see her before Gray and I left Greece, and we’d talked about Noah and Ben and how we’d both lost a treasured brother. My throat went dry and my face became wet with tears when I tried to express my gratitude that she’d never given up and that she’d come to the island—even though she’d known in her heart that Noah was already long dead. She’d shaken her head emphatically, grabbing my hand and telling me that Gray and I were the last pieces of the puzzle that she’d needed so desperately. And she’d said that her paintings could be true now. She didn’t have to hide behind the blue skies and fluffy clouds of her work anymore, because she could step back into that world and be at peace. She gave Gray and me one of her lovely paintings to take home with us.

  Kara and her mother were in Scotland right now with Cormack. Constance had been glad to get her daughter away from the media spotlight in America and escape. Of all of us, the media were most interested in Kara and her story. The story of a seven-year-old who’d killed an intruder and had later been adopted by a man who wanted to raise her in a psychopathic cult had created a media storm.

  I’d spoken to Cormack on the phone this morning. He said that today he was on a mission to show Kara a place that had been special to him as a child—a place named Fingal’s Cave, located on a tiny uninhabited island in Scotland. On the edge of the sea, the cave was about seventy feet high and two hundred and seventy feet deep, and composed of soaring, cathedral-like hexagonal columns. Cormack said he wanted to show Kara a place of hexagonals created by nature. As a boy, in the middle of the cave, he’d had the sense that nothing humans could create or understand could match the mystery of nature. He hoped that it would help Kara heal and come to understand that the teachings of the Saviours hadn’t been real or true.

  I’d heard from Richard, too. He and Ruth and Yolanda were hanging together for the moment. Richard had big dreams of the three of them starting a business together—that was so like Richard. I understood why the three of them were clinging together. None of them had much in the way of family to return to. Both Richard’s and Yolanda’s families had completely disowned them when they heard the news about the monastery. Ruth had finally met up with her daughters again, without the money she’d thought she needed to be able to do that. But there was still a long road ahead for Ruth—her daughters barely knew her.

  Hop had abandoned his studies and he’d flown back to China to be with his mother and family.

  Louelle and so many others didn’t get to return to their families. The horror and the shock of those families was everywhere on the news. I couldn’t bear it, especially knowing that I’d almost done the same to my own family. I knew that Ruth had visited Louelle’s family in America and had told them how much Louelle had loved them and wanted to come back to them as a new person.

  Twenty four people had travelled to the monastery in the hope of healing and a new life. Only six had survived to tell the tale. The media had dubbed us The Six.

  I hated that. It made us sound somehow victorious—like we’d emerged as the winners. We weren’t winners. Worse, the name gave no respect to all the people who’d died there on the island.

  A shiver ran over my skin beneath my thick jacket as the sunset darkened. Rising abruptly, I called out to Willow and Lilly, spilling a little of my coffee. I tried to keep any note of anxiousness from my voice but failed. I had trouble with dark places now. As if the entire world could suddenly plunge into pitch darkness and a set of insane challenges could begin. Challenges that you could never really win.

  The girls ran to us from the beach—Willow to me and Lilly to Gray. It was like that with Lilly now. Lilly had forged a deep connection to her daddy when she was sick and when I wasn’t there. And she seemed a little wary of me. But then she came to me for the first time since I’d been home and cuddled in tight, while Willow swapped to sitting on Gray’s lap. The girls’ cheeks were stung pink, their hair windblown.

  We all leaned in close, against each other and against the bracing cold. The sunset turned bronze and somehow even more beautiful, because it was on the edge of vanishing.

  Challenges lay ahead for us, as they did before. But what we had right now—this, being together—was everything. We had a new challenge in Lilly’s illness. I was terrified and scared for her, but we just had to find the best way forward from this point. Gray and I were going to find somewhere new to live, somewhere near the ocean where the weather was warmer. For Lilly’s sake.

  We stepped inside the house, the girls racing ahead to jostle for position on the scruffy rug in front of the fireplace—the same rug that Ben and I used to sit on and play board games during the long summer evenings here.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ANNI TAYLOR lives on The Central Coast, north of Sydney, Australia, with her partner and four boys.

  THE GAME YOU PLAYED is her debut thriller novel. Previously, she was a Features' Writer and Community Manager for Fairfax Media, Australia.

  She also writes young adult fiction under the name, Anya Allyn.

  Find out more about my books here:

  annitaylor.me

  BOOKS BY ANNI TAYLOR

  Other thriller books by Anni Taylor

  THE GAME YOU PLAYED

  Little Boy Blue, where did you go? Who led you away? Only I know….

  Two-year-old Tommy Basko goes missing from a popular inner-city playground. Six months later, his parents begin receiving cryptic messages in rhyme about Tommy.

  The police don’t believe the messages are from the abductor, but Tommy’s mother Phoebe is certain they’re a game meant for her.

  Against the advice of the police, Phoebe decides to play the game.

  She begins a frantic search for the writer of the rhymes, at the cost of causing her marriage to shatter.

  When the shocking identity of the message-writer is discovered, Phoebe’s desperate race for the truth has only just begun.

  Who took Tommy? And why?

  EXCERPT - THE GAME YOU PLAYED

  PHOEBE

  THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF PEOPLE in this world. People who steal other people and people who don’t.

  There are lots of ways of stealing a person.

  Grabbing a small child and running away with them is one of the worst ways of all.

  Six months ago, you did that.

  In the last days of December, the city of Sydney is shot with the blistering heat of summer, buzzing with festivals and exhibitions. The voices of Chinese, Japanese, British, American and other international tourists mingle with those
of Australian couples and families.

  At Darling Harbour, people dart in and out of the zoo, museums, and the IMAX, while diners people-watch from the open-air upmarket cafés and restaurants that hug the square-shaped harbour. In the middle of all this, a playground captures the children’s attention. The children grow shouty as they race from the water park to the giant slide to the climbing frames, their hands and faces sticky with ice-cream.

  Luke and I were there then with our two-year-old son, Tommy.

  You were there, too. Watching.

  Waiting for your chance to snatch him.

  Already, you had the letters prepared—the letters about Tommy you’d start sending us six months later.

  The game was about to start. Only I didn’t know it.

  PHOEBE

  SIX MONTHS AGO

  Late December

  LUKE AND TOMMY LOOKED MORE LIKE each other than Tommy looked like me. But Tommy had my eyes: a glossy, church-pew brown with a solemn stare. On my face, those eyes often appeared annoyingly pious, even if my thoughts were dark (which they quite often were).

  But on Tommy’s cherubic two-year-old face, those eyes held people in the palm of his hand. If a film producer ever wanted a kid that looked like he could stare into your immortal soul, Tommy was that kid. His hair, like Luke’s, was a thick, tufty dark blond. We let it grow past his collar because it looked endlessly cute sticking out at the angles that it did. He still had a bit of his baby chubbiness in his legs, with dimples in his knees that looked like winking eyes when he ran.

  Tommy’s knees were winking like a 1950s sailor’s eye right now. Luke, Tommy, and I had been at my grandmother’s house for twenty minutes, and Tommy was beginning to run everywhere.

  Run, wink, run, wink.

  He’d had as much sitting and playing quietly as his little body could handle. Now he needed to feel his body move.