Dime-store psychologists love clichés. According to them, to forge the mind of a monster, you absolutely need a fertile breeding ground: a broken childhood, heavy trauma, a dark basement, or unworthy parents.
That is false.
The Eliot family home contradicted absolutely every theory of criminality. It was a sun-drenched suburban house, where a comforting smell of clean laundry and baking cake constantly floated in the air. His mother often hummed while making dinner, his father came home from work with pockets full of jokes, and in the middle of the living room, a little three-year-old tornado named Cléa ran around bursting with that pure, crystalline laughter unique to children.
A commercial for the ideal family. A cocoon of gentleness.
And then, there was Eliot.
At eight years old, Eliot was not a problem child. It was actually the exact opposite: he was the terrifying definition of perfection.
He never cried when he fell in the yard, contenting himself with observing the blood beading on his scraped knee with curiosity. At the dinner table, he swallowed his broccoli and spinach without the slightest grimace, chewing each bite a precise number of times before swallowing.
His report card was immaculate, and his bedroom looked like a store window display: his toys were arranged by decreasing size, and his colored pencils were lined up on his desk according to the exact chromatic spectrum of the rainbow.
His parents were thrilled, albeit a little bewildered at times. They thought they had spawned a little genius, a child "mature for his age."
They were wrong.
Eliot was not mature. He was hollow.
Sitting on the living room couch that Sunday, his hands resting obediently on his knees, he watched his little sister trip on the edge of the rug and fall flat on her face.
Cléa let out a little squeak of surprise before her father lifted her off the floor by the armpits, tickling her to downplay the fall.
"Look at your brother, Cléa!" her father laughed. "Follow his example, he's being good!"
Eliot stared at the scene. His large brown eyes were clear, but behind his pupils, he felt neither amusement, nor affection, nor jealousy.
Inside his chest, where other children harbored a noisy, chaotic whirlwind of emotions, there was only a flat, metallic silence. An abyssal void.
He observed his parents with the detachment of a biologist studying a colony of macaques in the savanna.
With mechanical precision, Eliot contracted his zygomatic muscles. He narrowed his eyes slightly to make the expression more authentic and stretched his lips, revealing his small baby teeth in a perfectly symmetrical smile. Absolute mimicry.
Reassured by this positive social feedback, his father winked at him and went back to playing with Cléa.
As soon as his father turned his back, Eliot instantly dropped his smile. The muscles in his face relaxed all at once. He became a blank page again, smooth and indecipherable.
He wasn't sad, he wasn't unhappy. He was just there, observing a world whose music he completely failed to understand, contenting himself with imitating its dance with frightening perfection.
Right after that, Eliot slipped out to the garden. The Sunday afternoon sun pleasantly warmed the freshly mown lawn.
At the bottom of the garden, far from the laughter of his little sister chasing a ball, Eliot was crouching near the brick border of the flowerbed.
He was motionless. Almost petrified.
Beneath his eyes, an unbroken line of black ants bustled along a crack.
Eliot slowly raised his index finger, lowered it with millimeter precision, and pressed the pad of his finger onto one of the insects. A tiny, barely audible crunch echoed under his nail.
He removed his finger. The ant was crushed.
Eliot felt not an ounce of sadism, nor the slightest trace of childish anger. His heart rate hadn't increased. With the utmost calm, he simply triggered the mental stopwatch in his head.
One... two... three... four...
He watched the other ants. He was analyzing the exact time it took them to detect their peer's distress, break their perfect marching line, and sink into disorganized panic. Eight seconds. Interesting.
To verify if this result was a constant or a variable, he raised his finger again. He spotted an isolated ant, a little further away.
"Eliot?"
A large shadow suddenly veiled the sun. His father had just approached silently on the grass. He held a garden hose in one hand, his eyebrows slightly furrowed as he discovered the little massacre on the brick.
Eliot looked up, his face devoid of any expression. He didn't hide his hand, he didn't try to flee. He had no reason to, since he was completely unaware he was doing anything wrong.
His father put down the hose, crouched down to his level, and sighed softly. He didn't yell. In this house, they didn't scream at children.
"What are you doing, little guy?" he asked in a deep but steady voice.
"I am calculating the reaction time of the ants when they are attacked," Eliot replied with the clear diction of a child reciting a poem. "The average is eight seconds."
The father remained silent for a fraction of a second, taken aback by his eight-year-old son's "experiment." He placed a warm, protective hand on his boy's small shoulder.
"Listen to me carefully, Eliot. Stop that."
The little boy blinked, staring at his father, waiting for the rest of the instruction.
"In this family," the adult continued, looking him straight in the eyes, "we have a very important rule. We do not hurt those who are smaller or weaker than us. Never. Do you understand? It is our duty to protect them. Not to crush them."
Eliot looked down at the ant's corpse, then brought his empty gaze back up to his father.
He still felt no remorse. The concept of pain was totally abstract to him, and the value of an insect's life represented nothing more than negligible data.
However, his brain, a veritable computer in the midst of structuring itself, had just received a major new directive from its primary administrator.
If Entity A is weaker than Entity B, then Entity B must not harm Entity A. Entity B must protect Entity A.
The equation was simple. Clear. Irrefutable.
"Okay, Daddy," Eliot replied obediently, nodding his head. "I won't hurt those smaller than me anymore."
His father smiled at him, relieved, ruffled his hair, and went back to watering his roses, convinced he had awakened his son's compassion and empathy.
He didn't know that this sentence, spoken with such benevolence, had just been burned into the child's hard drive.
This absolute rule, this code of honor, would become Eliot's one and only moral compass. A compass that, very soon, would point toward a very real monster.
The elementary school playground looked like a noisy, chaotic social experiment.
Dozens of children ran in every direction, screaming for no apparent reason, and scraping their knees on the asphalt.
For Eliot, it was a tiring but necessary work environment.
He had understood very early on that an isolated child attracted the attention of adults, and the attention of adults led to useless appointments with the school psychologist. He had therefore put together a group of "friends."
Among them were Léo and Léa. Quiet twins with whom he often shared the bench near the sandbox. Eliot didn't really play tag or hide-and-seek with them. He stayed close by, feigning interest, nodding at the right times, and occasionally moving a plastic truck to validate his presence in the group activity. A perfect cover.
At 4:30 PM, the bell rang the end of the day. It was the time when parents gathered in front of the school's large green gates.
The twins' father picked them up almost every day. He was a tall, athletic man with a square jaw and perfectly styled salt-and-pepper hair.
He was the very archetype of the "super dad." The kind of neighborhood hero who brought packets of candy for his kids' friends, who knew all the yard monitors' names, and who made the teachers laugh their heads off.
"Ah, here's our ray of sunshine!" Madame Martin, the third-grade teacher, would often exclaim, blushing slightly at the father's jokes.
All the kids loved him. The other parents envied him.
But Eliot didn't look at the man with starry eyes. Leaning against a pillar in the covered play area, his backpack perfectly centered on his shoulders, he observed him with his usual radar, scanning the situation in search of logic.
And the logic was stalling. There was a major bug in his system.
If Father = Joy and Candy, then Children should = Smiles and Running toward him.
Yet, Eliot observed the exact opposite. Every time the father's massive silhouette appeared at the gate, Léo and Léa instantly stopped breathing.
Their shoulders would hunch up. Their little bodies would freeze in an abnormal rigidity. They never ran toward him; they walked with heavy steps, eyes glued to the asphalt, like condemned prisoners approaching the scaffold.
No one else noticed this micro-reaction of terror. The adults were too busy roaring with laughter at the "super dad."
Eliot's gaze, cold and analytical, fell upon the man's hands.
When the father greeted his children, he would bend down and often place his large hand on little Léa's shoulder.
To the rest of the world, it was a tender gesture. But Eliot saw the pressure of the fingers. The vise. The man's knuckles whitened very slightly. His hand lingered a bit too long, his thumb sliding slowly toward the base of the girl's neck in a movement that belonged to no standard catalog of parental gestures.
And then, there were his eyes. The father gave a toothy smile to the teacher, but when his gaze dropped to the twins, the smile didn't reach his pupils. His eyes were dark. Possessive.
A normal child would have felt fear. They would have recoiled, instinctively terrified by this predatory aura.
Eliot felt no such thing. His heart rate remained steady at sixty-five beats per minute. He simply blinked slowly, recording the data. This family's equation was wrong. The man with the big smile was hiding an anomaly.
Little Eliot had just spotted the wolf in the sheepfold, and he fully intended to investigate the problem.
The next morning, at recess, the sky was gray and the air was biting. Most of the students were running around to stay warm. Léo and Léa, however, stayed huddled together under the covered area, silent.
Eliot approached them with his measured gait, a small carton of apple juice in his hand. Adjusting his imaginary glasses, his gaze fell on Léo's left wrist. The sleeve of the little boy's sweater was pushed up slightly.
On the pale skin, purplish spots formed a very specific pattern. Four small oval marks on one side, one larger mark on the other.
Bruises caused by a slap or grab, Eliot's brain deduced instantly. Shape: adult hand. Force applied: excessive.
His gaze then slid to Léa. The little girl lowered her head, but not fast enough to hide the yellowish bruise peeking out from the collar of her t-shirt.
Eliot stopped in front of them. He didn't ask how they were doing. He didn't try to comfort them by taking their hands. With the clinical coldness of a tax inspector conducting an audit, he blocked their only exit route by leaning against the brick wall.
"Your bruises, Léo. And your neck, Léa," Eliot stated in a monotone voice, without the slightest pity. "Where do those injuries come from?"
The twins jumped. Léo frantically pulled on his sleeve to hide his wrist, his eyes panicked, scanning the yard to make sure no one was listening.
"I-it's nothing..." Léo stammered. "We fell at the park. Off the slide."
"The mark does not correspond to a fall," Eliot retorted with the pragmatism of a machine. "Those are finger marks. Who did this?"
Léa began to cry silently. Big tears rolled down her childish cheeks. A normal little boy would have been upset. Eliot merely waited for the reaction to pass to get his information.
"It's a secret," the little girl finally whispered between two sobs, terrified. "Daddy says it's a secret game... in the basement... but that we play it wrong. So he has to punish us. But it's because he loves us too much, he said. You can't say anything, Eliot, please! He'll get mad!"
Eliot blinked. The facts were now established. The data aligned. Father breaks the absolute rule. He harms the smaller ones. "Noted," Eliot replied simply before turning on his heel, leaving the trembling twins behind him.
His action plan was simple and dictated by pure logic: faced with a problem, you had to alert the system administrator. At school, the administrator was the teacher.
He crossed the yard at a steady pace, dodging foam balls, and stopped in front of Madame Asif, who was monitoring the yard while sipping coffee from a plastic cup.
"Ma'am," Eliot said, tugging slightly on the sleeve of her cardigan. "I need to report a problem. Léo and Léa's father is inflicting injuries on them. They have bruises that look like domestic violence."
The teacher nearly choked on her coffee. She looked down at the top student in the class, her eyebrows furrowed in surprise, before her face relaxed to make way for a hearty, ringing laugh.
"Oh, Eliot!" she exclaimed, crouching down to gently pat his cheek. "What an imagination! Is it because you read too many detective books?"
Eliot didn't step back, but he didn't smile either.
"I do not read novels. I am reporting facts to you," he insisted calmly. "There are finger marks on—"
"Shh, big guy, that's enough," the teacher cut him off with a condescending smile, the kind reserved for children who invent monsters under the bed. "Their daddy is a wonderful man! He's the president of the PTA; he even fixed the classroom heater last week. Léo and Léa are daredevils, they must have taken a tumble at the park, that's all. Go on, run along and play with the others!"
She stood back up and returned to chatting with a colleague, brushing the information aside with disconcerting ease.
Eliot remained frozen in the middle of the yard. The cold enveloped him, but it wasn't from the autumn wind. It was the coldness of an inevitable conclusion.
He had just understood a fundamental flaw in humanity. Adults were not protectors. They preferred the easy way out.
The teacher's brain refused to accept the horror because horror implied problems, paperwork, conflicts. The man fixed heaters and smiled nicely; therefore, he couldn't be a monster.
Adults lie to themselves to preserve their comfort, concluded the computer in Eliot's head.
The 4:30 PM bell rang, releasing an unbroken stream of screaming children toward the school's large green gates. It was the usual ballet of reunions, shouts of joy, squashed snacks at the bottom of backpacks, and rushed parents.
Eliot stood apart from the flow, perfectly still near the concrete pillar at the entrance. His coat was buttoned all the way up, his backpack sitting straight on his shoulders. He was waiting for his mother, observing the scene with the impassivity of a surveillance camera.
In the middle of the crowd, the tall stature of the twins' father appeared.
As usual, the man radiated a suffocating, fake warmth. He crossed paths with Madame Martin, the teacher, and tossed her yet another joke with an exaggerated wink. The teacher, the very one who had brushed off the twins' bruises hours earlier, threw her head back in a crystalline, complicit burst of laughter.
Eliot watched the teacher laugh. He watched the man smile.
Then, he saw Léo and Léa stepping toward their father. They walked with their heads down, their shoulders hunched.
"Ah, here are my champions!" the man exclaimed in a cheerful voice.
He leaned down. His large hand, heavy and fleshy, came down on the back of Léa's little neck. It was not a caress.
It was a grip. A claim of ownership. Under the pressure of those adult fingers, the little girl gave a violent flinch, a shudder of pure terror that she tried in vain to suppress.
The teacher, three feet away, was still smiling, blind to the scene.
At that precise moment, at eight and a half years old, something broke for good in Eliot's mind. Or rather, something froze there forever.
The illusion of the good child died on the spot. All trace of feigned innocence, imitated politeness, and social mimicry disappeared from his face, giving way to an absolute void. His pupils dilated slightly. His gaze lost all human spark, becoming as cold, hard, and mineral as a block of obsidian.
The glacial entity, that pure logic devoid of empathy, had just taken the controls.
The little boy analyzed the situation one last time. The child's brain ran at full speed, assembling the pieces of the puzzle with terrifying lucidity:
Daddy said we never hurt the smaller ones. That is the Rule. This man is hurting Léa and Léo. He is breaking the Rule. The teacher laughs with the man. Grown-ups see nothing because they don't want to see anything.
The mathematical conclusion imposed itself. The outside world's protection system was a vast sham. Adults were nothing but empty shells, cowardly and useless.
Eliot didn't blink. His face frozen in an impenetrable marble mask, he stared at the man's hand gripping his classmate's neck. He felt neither hatred, nor anger, nor pity. Just the imperative, mechanical need to correct a problem.
"Since the grown-ups do nothing when the smaller ones are broken..." Eliot's inner voice murmured silently, with coldness. "...I will have to conduct my own experiment to fix the problem."
He didn't know yet how he was going to go about it, but he was going to find a solution all his own. This family father was about to become his next colony of ants.
End of Chapter 12.