Léo and Léa's living room looked like the epicenter of a nuclear attack.
It was Wednesday afternoon. A dozen eight-year-olds were screaming at the top of their lungs, covered in chocolate frosting and neon streamers. A playlist of horrendous pop music blasted distorted bass from the TV speakers, and an entertainer dressed as Spider-Man was desperately trying to maintain a semblance of order.
It was the twins' birthday. The perfect party, organized by the "super dad."
In the midst of this collective hysteria, Eliot sat on the couch, a small paper plate holding a slice of cake resting on his knees. He wore a perfectly ironed plaid shirt. He wasn't smiling. He wasn't clapping his hands to the beat of the music.
He was a statue of ice in the middle of chaos.
He hadn't come to have fun, or even to eat cake, for that matter. He was there because his problem demanded a solution. Ever since the incident in front of the school gates, the anomaly had become glaringly obvious: the system would never fix itself. The teachers laughed, the mothers looked the other way, and the wolf continued to squeeze the lambs' necks with complete impunity.
"We do not hurt those smaller than us," his father had said.
Eliot swept the room with his unfathomable gaze, searching for the most efficient way to enforce the Rule.
His attention was drawn to the end of the hallway. The basement door was ajar. That was where the large secondary refrigerator was located, the one storing the drinks for the party.
Eliot stood up, abandoning his untouched cake, and silently approached the doorway. He surveyed the terrain.
It was an old-fashioned staircase. Raw concrete, with no covering or anti-slip strips. The slope was severe, dizzying even, and the solid wood handrail looked wobbly. A single bare, dusty bulb hung from the ceiling, casting a yellowish light that struggled to dispel the gloom at the bottom of the steps.
The eight-year-old child's mind, cold and analytical, instantly kicked into gear. He began to process the variables with implacable logic.
Data A: The Father. He weighed about ninety kilos. He was a muscular, fast adult man. Data B: Eliot. He weighed barely twenty-five kilos, clothes included.
The conclusion was obvious: a direct confrontation or frontal attack had a zero percent success rate. He needed a force multiplier. Something greater and more absolute than human strength.
He needed gravity.
For the past hour, Eliot had been observing the father's ballet. The man regularly went down to the basement to restock the buffet. With every trip up, Eliot had noticed a crucial detail: the father used both arms to carry heavy cardboard boxes filled with glass soda bottles.
The bulk of the box forced the man to arch his back slightly to compensate for the weight. Worse still: the box, held at chest height, completely blocked his view of his own feet.
The little boy hadn't yet studied physics in middle school, but his computer-like brain intuitively understood the concept of the center of gravity. A ninety-kilo man carrying a heavy load leaning forward on a steep slope was, in reality, an unstable edifice, maintained by a precarious balance.
It would only take a minimal force, applied at the exact moment the posture was most vulnerable, to trigger an irreversible collapse of the system.
A simple flick.
Eliot looked over his shoulder. The children were starting a chaotic dance around the pirate. The twins' mother was in the kitchen. No one was looking.
He slipped into the shadow of the landing, his small body blending perfectly into the darkness at the top of the stairs. The silence of the basement contrasted sharply with the din of the living room.
He stood very straight, arms at his sides, face frozen in a marble expression. He was no longer a schoolboy. He was the patch for a glitch in nature. There was no hatred in his childish heart, not the slightest trace of anger or sadism. It was just a cleanup.
And the father's heavy footsteps were just beginning to echo on the concrete of the bottom step.
The trap had just opened.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
The heavy footsteps echoed on the raw concrete of the stairwell. The twins' father was coming up from the basement.
Hidden in the gloom of the landing, Eliot listened. He didn't need to see to analyze the situation. The adult's breathing was erratic, short. The crystalline clinking of the glass bottles knocking together indicated an unstable load.
When the massive silhouette finally emerged into the pale halo of the ground-floor bulb, Eliot's hypothesis was confirmed.
The man was carrying a huge box of sodas with both hands, pressed against his chest. The large, heavy box completely blocked his downward field of vision. He was climbing blindly, relying solely on muscle memory.
Eliot held his breath. His small muscles tensed.
The man placed the sole of his shoe on the penultimate step. To compensate for the fifteen kilos of glass and liquid pulling on his arms, he did exactly what logic demanded of him: he arched his lower back, throwing his shoulders backward.
At that precise moment, his center of gravity shifted dangerously toward the empty void of the stairwell. He was precariously balanced, a colossus with feet of clay held up by the simple inertia of his upward movement.
This was the moment. The window of opportunity.
Eliot stepped out of the shadows. There was no war cry. No diabolical sneer, no spark of hatred in his pupils. With a face of absolute serenity, the eight-year-old boy took a single, sharp step forward.
He raised his two small hands, placed them firmly flat against the rough cardboard, right at the level of the adult's sternum, and pushed with all his might.
The kinetic energy of the twenty-five-kilo little boy, applied at the perfect tipping point, did the rest.
The father let out a gasp of surprise. Above the box, his eyes met Eliot's for a fraction of a second. He read an interstellar void in them. The adult's brain understood he was falling, but his reflexes were too slow. His self-preservation instinct ordered him to grab the wooden handrail, but his hands reflexively refused to let go of the heavy box.
He tipped backward.
The freefall was extremely short, but incredibly violent. The weight of the box dragged the man down with the force of an anvil.
CRACK.
The sound was sharp, sickening, final. A snap of broken bones that almost managed to drown out the distorted bass of the pop music blaring in the next room. The father's neck had just struck the unforgiving edge of the reinforced concrete step.
The instantly disarticulated body dropped the box in a crash of broken glass and sugary foam. Like a puppet whose strings had been cut with a single snip of the scissors, the colossus tumbled down the rest of the stairs, bouncing heavily, before coming to rest at the very bottom in a pool of dark soda, his neck bent at an angle strictly forbidden by human anatomy. Just like a certain Jean-Pierre, years later.
The Rule was upheld. The problem was solved.
Silence fell back over the stairwell, broken only by the fizzing of the soda foam.
From the top of the steps, the eight-year-old boy looked down to the bottom of the stairwell.
The scene was motionless. The dark, sugary liquid escaping from the broken bottles slowly mixed with a much thicker trickle of blood that was beginning to stretch across the raw concrete. The twins' father was no longer moving. The angle of his head relative to his shoulders defied all laws of anatomy.
Eliot mentally examined himself. He waited for panic to rise, for tears to well up, or for his heart to start pounding against his ribs the way the other children's would have in the living room. But nothing came. His pulse remained perfectly steady, set to its cruising rhythm.
It was exactly the same sensation as in the garden with the ant.
A pressure applied. A result obtained. The anomaly was corrected. Léo and Léa would no longer have finger-shaped bruises on their wrists. His own father's fundamental rule had just been followed to the letter.
Face like marble, Eliot turned around, gently closed the basement door, making sure not to slam it, and returned to the living room.
The chaos was still in full swing. The Spider-Man entertainer was trying to lead a dozen hyperactive kids in a conga line to deafening pop music. Eliot wove between the children, went back to sit in his exact spot on the couch, and picked up his paper plate again.
With his little plastic spoon, he cut a piece of his cake. He put it in his mouth and half-closed his eyes. The chocolate frosting was truly excellent. He savored it slowly, his cheek slightly bulging.
It took a good ten minutes for the mechanics of the tragedy to be set in motion.
One of the children knocked over his glass of fruit juice on the coffee table. The twins' mother, exasperated but smiling, wiped her forehead.
"I'm going to get some paper towels from downstairs," she called out to the entertainer.
She opened the basement door.
The scream that followed sounded like nothing human.
It was a visceral, primal cry that tore through the heavy air of the house and instantly cut off the children's laughter. The music suddenly seemed absurd. The entertainer froze. The mother collapsed to her knees on the landing, holding her head in both hands, screaming her husband's name into the abyss of the stairwell.
Party's over.
The rest of the afternoon was nothing but a blur of blue flashing lights sweeping across the living room curtains. The paramedics and the police burst in, trampling the confetti with their heavy safety boots. The children were crying, corralled in a corner, terrified by the atmosphere.
Eliot, meanwhile, observed the flurry of uniforms with the composure of a building inspector checking completed work.
As he had predicted, the adults' denial made things much easier. The paramedic shook his head as he came up from the basement, followed by two sweating police officers.
"That's the worst way to die at home," sighed one of the officers, writing in his notepad. "A stupid loss of balance. His arms were full with that damn box, he couldn't catch himself. His neck hit the edge of the step. Killed instantly. Domestic accident, Chief."
No one looked for fingerprints on the box. No one considered for a single second that a neatly combed kid, sitting obediently on the couch, could have calculated a lethal push angle.
Yet, the true shock of that day wasn't going to be the death of the "super dad."
While the firemen were taking the body away in a black body bag, a zealous young police officer went down into the makeshift office at the back of the basement to look for the deceased's ID. The man's computer was in sleep mode. The officer bumped the mouse out of reflex. The screen lit up.
What he saw made him turn pale.
Within a few hours, the "domestic accident" case took a turn of absolute darkness. The search of the office revealed the unspeakable. Hundreds of hidden files, photos, unspeakable videos involving an organized network, and chilling evidence of what the twins endured at night.
The neighborhood, which had been preparing to mourn a local hero, plunged into sickened shock. Glances shifted. Horror replaced pity.
Léo and Léa were immediately taken into care and brought to safety. They would never return to that basement again.
Little Eliot, on the other hand, had finished his cake long ago. But watching the news a few days later, he knew his hypothesis had been perfect. He had been right all along.
Three days later, the family cocoon of the Morel house seemed totally impervious to the horror of the outside world.
It was dinnertime. The sweet smell of a gratin floated in the air. In the living room, the television murmured the evening news headlines. Eliot's parents, still shocked by the rumors beginning to leak into the neighborhood, were talking in low voices.
They were unaware of the most sordid details—the police were filtering the information—but they sincerely pitied "that poor widow" and those "poor little twins" struck by fate.
Sitting cross-legged on the soft rug, Eliot was snapping Lego bricks together with millimeter precision.
He kept an eye on the flat screen. The news anchor briefly mentioned the neighborhood tragedy, speaking of a "terrible domestic accident" that had led to "disturbing discoveries."
Eliot snapped a red brick onto a blue brick. Calm reigned. Léo and Léa were no longer in danger. The "problem" had been eradicated from the face of the earth, and no one would ever suspect him.
For the first time in his short life, a pure emotion, although foreign to his usual state, swelled within him. A sense of accomplishment. His lips stretched. Not one of those symmetrical, fake smiles he served to his mother. No. It was a tiny, microscopic sneer. A smile of absolute satisfaction, cold and victorious.
"Come with me. Right now."
The voice cracked like a whip above his head.
A bony hand, whose fingers closed like eagle talons, clamped down on his wrist. Before he could even analyze the situation, Eliot was yanked off the rug with unexpected strength.
It was his maternal grandmother.
She was a dry, stiff woman who almost never smiled, and whose gray gaze always seemed to pierce through pretenses. She was spending a few days at the house, and since her arrival, she hadn't stopped watching Eliot with silent suspicion.
She didn't alert the parents, who were too busy debating in the kitchen. With a violent pull, she dragged the little boy into the gloom of the hallway, away from the light of the living room and prying eyes.
She pinned him against the wallpapered wall. The old woman's breathing was shallow. She reeked of lavender cologne and pure terror. Her fingers dug so hard into Eliot's wrist that they cut off his blood circulation.
Eliot looked up. His face instantly resumed its smooth mask; his eyes became large, tranquil lakes once again.
But the old woman shook her head, her jaw clenched, her eyes wide with the horror of what she had just caught him doing on the rug.
"Don't give me that face," she hissed in a trembling voice, so low it sounded like a snake's hiss. "I saw you. I saw how you were watching the TV. I've seen your eyes ever since we found out about that man."
Eliot tilted his head slightly, calculating the probability that she had empirical evidence of his involvement. Zero. She only had intuition.
"Let me go, Grandma. You're hurting me," he stated in a monotone voice, testing the victim-child protocol.
"Shut up!" she spat, leaning in until her face brushed against his. "Don't play games with me. I know you did something. I feel it in my bones. Your father and your mother are blind, they think you're a little angel. But I see what's inside. There is nothing."
She tightened her grip, her nails digging into the boy's skin.
"You have the Devil's eyes. You are not human. You are a monster, Eliot."
Monster.
That seven-letter word pierced through the eight-year-old child's armor of ice and slammed into his central core with the force of a meteorite.
The old woman shoved him away in disgust, as if she had just touched an infected carcass, and returned to the living room wiping her hands on her skirt, leaving him alone in the shadows of the hallway.
Eliot stood frozen. His heart rate, usually so perfect, suddenly raced. A cold sweat beaded on his neck.
Monster.
He slowly turned his head toward the brightly lit living room. Through the doorway, he saw his father make a funny face at Cléa, who burst into joyful laughter. He saw his mother smile with that infinite tenderness that warmed the whole house.
This was his world. The only place where he was safe. The only place where his imitation of life worked. He loved his parents. In a coded, strange way, but he loved them. Above all, he had a vital need for their love to survive.
But if they discovered what he had done on the stairs... if they saw the coldness with which he had pushed that man... they would react like the grandmother. They would look at him with disgust. They would cast him out into the darkness.
Absolute, primal, irrational terror washed over the child. The anxiety of abandonment struck him like lightning.
The computer in his skull triggered a critical emergency procedure. A psychological lobotomy. To survive in the light, to continue receiving his parents' love, the killing machine had to disappear.
In the shadows of that suburban hallway, Eliot's mind fractured in two.
He took that part of himself—that analytical, cold, pragmatic, and murderous predator—and locked it inside a mental safe, tossing the key into the abyss of his subconscious. And to ensure that no one, ever, would suspect what he harbored inside him, his brain decided to build the ultimate camouflage. The perfect opposite.
If he was cold, he would become hyper-emotional. If he was calculating, he would become clumsy. If he was deadly, he would become a coward.
He began to tremble. His eyes filled with real tears of panic. His knees buckled. When he took a step toward the light of the living room, he tripped on the edge of the rug, not out of mimicry, but from a genuine clumsiness born of his new internal chaos.
"Oh, sweetheart, you're so pale!" his mother cried out, running to him to gather him in her arms.
Eliot buried his face in her neck, sobbing with terror. The boy of ice had just died. The twenty-year-old "Eliot"—the cowardly, anxious, hypochondriac student that everyone would come to know—had just been born.
A pathetic shield. A simple, trembling shell, designed with the sole purpose of hiding the true assassin that now slept inside.
Twelve years later.
The suffocating darkness of the bedroom was total. The silence of the night was broken only by the distant hum of an old fridge and the steady rhythm of breathing.
Suddenly, the breathing stopped.
The sheets slid to the floor without a sound. Eliot's silhouette sat up in the dark and perched on the edge of the mattress. His bare feet touched the freezing tiles.
Usually, a nighttime awakening for Eliot involved a series of pitiful groans, a back hunched by fatigue, toes painfully stubbed against the foot of the bed, and the shuffling gait of an anxious zombie.
But that night, the narrative had radically changed.
The silhouette that rose in the gloom did not slump. The back was perfectly straight. The shoulders, usually rolled forward in a posture of eternal victimhood, were square, relaxed, ready for action.
He walked toward the bathroom. It was a silent, fluid gait. Feline. He reached the small, windowless bathroom. His hand struck the light switch firmly.
The neon light above the sink crackled before flooding the room with harsh, aggressive white light.
Eliot slowly raised his eyes to the mirror, speckled with limescale stains.
The face staring back into the glass was indeed that of the twenty-year-old young man, with his drawn features, messy hair, and pale complexion. But the eyes... The eyes had absolutely nothing in common with those of the student terrified of his own shadow.
It was the dark, absolute, unfathomable gaze of the eight-year-old child at the top of the concrete stairs. The interstellar void. The Original. The Monster.
A slight chill, cold and electric, ran down the back of his head, descending along his neck. "He" was fully in control. He tilted his head very slightly to the side, studying the face of his own host with an almost clinical curiosity.
A smile took shape. It wasn't the tight smile of the embarrassed student. It was an icy, stretched sneer, devoid of the slightest ounce of human warmth. The smile of a chess player who has just realized he's already won the game ten moves ahead.
His lips parted slightly, and he murmured to his own reflection in a low, gravelly voice, almost amused by the stupidity of his own conscience:
"He's going to have to realize eventually that I'm waking up more and more often..."
Click.
The switch flicked. Cut.
Cause of death: Clean rupture of the cervical vertebrae (C1-C2) following a backward fall.
Verdict: Domestic accident due to loss of balance while carrying a heavy load.
Red Flag for Predators: Never underestimate the intelligence of a quiet child when you have your arms full at the top of a flight of stairs. The clichés about the "weird" kid sometimes have a grain of truth to them.
Hello everyone! I have some bad news to share with you: this novel is coming to an end... well, only volume 1! To be completely honest, I haven't started writing volume 2 yet, so you'll have to wait a while before it arrives.
All that to say, I've had a blast writing Eliot's adventures up to this point, and I thank from the bottom of my heart those of you who took the time to read my story.
The next chapters will be the last ones. They will adopt a lighter tone to wrap up this volume, like a sort of epilogue if you will!
PS: HUGE THANKS TO DaoistwV8YKr