CHAPTER 10:The Shell and the Glasses

I remember. They came upon me with lust in their cold, impervious eyes. Their gaze was saturated with repulsion and hatred. Fingers reached, teeth grinded. A chant hummed in the background. Then Ralph’s and Piggy’s faces in the mob. I shouted to them, they needed to know about the dead man. But then, the fall. The pain came and enveloped my body and I thought that there could be no worse pain than the one that paralyzed me. But I was wrong. There was still the boys, determined to kill the beast. They threw themselves on me and all I could do was lay on the damp, grainy sand and let them tea me apart.


I never gave much consideration to how I would die, but when I did picture my death, it was in a train crash, or by the means of a fatal disease. Being tortured and killed by people I knew, and might even consider friends, never came to mind. Now I watch what happens on the island. I hover above the deceiving place in all it’s picturesque beauty like a bird and see everything and anything, but no one seems to see me.

I heard Ralph and Piggy talking about the night I died, and for a moment I felt revulsion in the pit of my stomach towards them. They were covered in translucent, purple bruises – evidence that they participated in the savagery of Jack’s wild dance. They were cautious of admitting that they partook in the bloody event, and insisted that they left early to Sam and Eric, who as well seemed to have convinced themselves that they held no part in it.

Jack was the opposite. He had adjusted himself to being chief and acted like a king, ordering other boys around and sitting apart from the rest of the boys he had recruited in a cave near Castle Rock. He is a very different leader than Ralph. Ralph never beat up littluns, but a littlun called Wilfred lay on the cold, hard, rock floor, whimpering.
He held a meeting like the ones Ralph had held many times before, but it was on much darker topics. Unlike Ralph, Piggy, Sam, and Eric, Jack openly admitted that he took part in what he thought was injuring the beast, but was really my murder. He told the boys there that the beast was in disguise, so he must not have been completely blinded as to not recognize me. Even though Jack believed that he hurt the beast that was disguised as me, if I had killed anything that even slightly looked like a human being, I would be entirely guilt ridden. It shows how much Jack and all the other boys are controlled by the repulsive, theological beast: mankind’s essential illness. It lies in everyone, waiting for a chance to unleash its full potential. It has been in the minds of some of these boys to long, I am afraid that they will never be purged in these conditions.