Father of the Flies

by JCohen01

Ralph, Jack, and the other violent and depraved big'uns have been rescued, and sailed away from the burning wretch of an island. However, hiding in caves and in the forests, the youngest and most innocent of the boys, presumed dead in the fire, are left behind. In this sequel to "Lord of the Flies," the boys search for security and stability, often falling victim to old tendencies.

Father of the Flies

By Jared Cohen

November 26th, 2014

CHAPTER ONE: A Shelter from the Storm

Hidden in the hollow of a rock, their world continued to burn. The three boys, like animals recoiling from the sound of thunder, hid by the deepest wall, piled one on top of another. The tallest of them held the other two under his arms, burying their faces in his torso like they were being nursed. He faced away from the edge of the cave, the ceiling of which cast the wavering shadow in which the heap of naked bodies shivered. The tall boy's long, messy hair draped over the others as protectively as his arms, and clung to the back of his neck and to the others' shoulders in sweaty brown masses. His hands, twisted into claws, gripped at the skin he was holding, trying to stabilize himself as the world was gyrating. Meanwhile, the two beneath him mistook this desperate smothering for an earnest embrace, and were comforted despite the crunching and hissing clamour outside, along with the orange and red lights eclipsing from behind the cave walls.

A whine manifested outside, unlike the other noises storming about. This one was distinctly more human. The sound evolved into a warped scream, and burst into the cave in the form of a scratched-up boy, face and hair blackened with soot and smoke. As his yelling stifled, he collapsed to the stone floor and crawled into the sweaty, heaving mass and under the brown-haired boy's arm, completing the pink and hairy portrait of a litter of sick dogs. As the steadfast fire became louder and hungrier, audibly devouring its surroundings, the tremulous gang huddled closer together and further from the radiance and became strangely more mindful of its own noises. The soot-faced boy's muffled panting seemed closer every second, and one boy, whose skin had become freckled by the sun, and hair bleached of hue similarly, found the puffing unnerving, and was less distressed before this new one overpopulated the cave.

The youngest, face buried in the brown-haired boy's neck, thought about the noise which reminded him of an unintelligible nostalgia. He longed for something that he used to have; a person, someone older and taller than himself that he couldn't quite recall. These thoughts were dampened by the relentless uproar beyond the cave and the deafening huffing of the intruder. His mind turned instead to earthquakes, and he saw with a certainty he could never pronounce that the land he lay on was moments away from crumbling, and in minutes the world would sink. This thought manifested nearly instantly, as clouds covered the already hidden sky, shading the cave entrance but brightening the illuminating background, and then the sky opened up.

Earlier, the sound of tree trunks catching and bursting was inaudible and the smoke had gracefully kept its distance. Now, the fire became claustrophobic, like the boys in the rock hollow it invaded. And only the thunder overpowered this. The opening became obscured, not only by darkness, but with green smoke and water vapour, and the rain splashed close enough to make them shiver out of anxiousness and ironic coldness. The hissing and crunching attacked the boys, threatening to crumble the thin wall of stone protecting them. If any of them had opened his eyes he'd have found himself to be trapped, because an opaque fourth wall had been built out of smothering blindness, besides the flashes of crimson and the bright white of lightning penetrating it in waves. Outside their cave was a battle of two indignant forces fighting a war in which humans could only take officious strides. The sound of the endless rain pounding down on the irrepressible fire was like watching giants fight, the understanding that intervention is irrelevant and human casualties are not counted. During a short lapse in his panic, the blond boy felt awed by his insignificance and considered how mindlessly a fire could consume him, but fell back into shivers and fear after the thundering sky rattled them.

Suddenly the youngest boy had a vision, though it might've been a memory, or maybe just a dream. An abrupt clamour surrounded and closed in on him, a cautious display which quickly turned savage. He couldn't see it, but he knew it was some considerable power far beyond his understanding, something that dwarfed him in physical stature and significance, and yet it wanted him dead. He remembered feeling undeserving of such wrath, and, in a moment conscious helplessness, even having felt flattered that he had been called out, of all people, to suffer it, one of the few names drawn to face the unwieldy hand of God. The sublimity of a spiteful and unjust demise brought by an apathetic world failed to overwhelm him, but instead sedated his dismay and hurt into a numbness. His face became stiff and his palms swollen like balloons.

The silence of realist despair quickly faded as the chance of survival surfaced, and abated the turbulence. The indignation from the cruel sky retreated but marked this boy with a suffered longing that cannot be translated into words. As the fantasy faded and he found himself again in a bitter cave in a bleak storm of thunder and fire, searching for, but unable to find, himself, shaken to the core. He wrinkled his eyelids shut until the pressure made him cry, and he buried his face deeper into the brown-haired boy's warm chest. The comforting feeling, safety amid a hazardous world, was so familiar, and he again felt a nostalgic yearning for something he could only recall in foggy pictures and words in a blur. More than that, there was a feeling he wanted to feel, but he couldn't put his finger on it; and if he could he wouldn't understand.

When he was younger, or from an assortment of memories once took for granted, maybe asleep, in a vision or a fever dream, he had caught a fleeting glimpse of an unexplainable rush that was now lost in time, muffled alien fears and a snorting whine echoed in a cold gray hollow. This boy, the youngest of the four, felt a vengeful, angry intent to attack the rain and the fire, hurt it like it threatened every second to hurt him, interrupt its barbarity like it disturbed his thoughts. Despite this, he was no less anxious than the rest of the cowering bodies in the hushed dogpile. He wept, and lifted his face, glowing dimly under the sputtering shadows cast by the raging fire and intruded with raindrops, green smoke and vapour. His face paint of mud and hog blood, still visible from the previous hunt, was flaking and dripping under his sweat. He articulated a choked whisper loud enough for the others to hear, but quiet enough for them to pretend not to:

"We're sinking, I tell you, we're sinking!"

A few hours earlier, the blond boy had found himself wandering the forest when a neglected campfire had grown into an all-consuming inferno.

Chased by flashing visions of the warmer half of the colour spectrum, he became scared, confused and cornered when the fire initially started. Aching for something maternal, paternal, a cozy protected feeling conjured by memories of a hearth, but untrusting of it because of the inferno around him, the blond boy ran while opening and closing his mouth with rounded lips, the pronunciation of a syllable, home, at the tip of his tongue, but unable to remember it, or what it meant. He found himself guided across a narrow bridge to a gray and desolate peninsula. It was hospitable to him because it carried memories of warmth and fraternity, and he knew that it couldn't burn because it was made of rock.

The boy with sun-bleached blond hair and skin jumped into a familiar burrow. The cave was twenty feet deep, its floor littered charcoal from past fires, along scattered segments of wood, some burnt, some in piles to fuel the next pyre, and some sticks long and sharpened into spears which porous bark-stripped frames had since absorbed and became coated in the dried blood of prey and the anxious sweat of their pursuers. The primal weapons had been all over the cave a few hours ago, as most boys felt safest sleeping with one by their sides. He brushed the pointed sticks to the side, giving him the space to assume a fetal position and weep, the fire growing stronger, viler and more foreign to his senses and experiences. He glanced to his side and picked up the hunting knife that was left in the cave, since it was used to sharpen all the spears. Its use had thoroughly dulled it, and its exposure to the elements left it rusted and raw. He clutched it with both hands and blindly made stabbing motions at the air. Realizing how foolish it is to fend off a forest fire with a knife, he pushed it to the side, next to the spears and the remnants pair of spectacles missing both its arms and one of its lenses. The glasses must not be lost, he remembered, nor the knife, and this is very, very important.

"Knife, specs," he murmured, forgetting the fire for an instant. "Knife, specs… cave."

The rumbling from outside, still mostly muffled by the stone walls, he picked up the two items. He considered their nature and realized just how important it really was that they are never broken, because these are unlike any other things around him. The knife is sharp. So are the spears, but those are expendable. The knife has a property of irreplaceability and functionality that makes it sharper, in an ideal way. The sticks are pointier, they stab deeper, draw more blood, and in all real ways, are more utile but the knife has the ability to confer its attribute, and if needed, one could survive with it alone. For the first time in a while, the blond boy felt the long unkempt hair plastered to his brow and ears, and how the knife could perform luxury tasks that a wooden spear could not.

Because of its ability to create and confer, and the importance and joy he felt for his company to possess a contrived tool, the blond boy knew the knife to be the perfect form of sharpness. Trying to improve this rusty piece of metal in a comfortable wooden handle would only cause injustice to the knife and debility to the would-be inventor. The only advancement the knife could find would be the affixing of additional blades, or some kind of case to keep it in, to adjourn oxidation of the metal and perpetuate its precision.

Remembering the spears, and with that, the hunts, he thought about the tough outer skin of pigs, and how more than once he'd lanced a spear its way with lethal intent, only for it to bounce off its hide and be stomped beneath its savage hooves, leaving only the softest prick of the skin, if at all, invisible beneath its concealing fur and wrinkles. When the pig finally was killed and laid over the flames, its flesh would cook until it was soft and juicy but its husk would contract and darken into an impenetrably tough shell. This rubbery hide couldn't be stabbed with spears, and could hardly be breached with teeth to get to the pungent meat inside (another job reserved for the precious knife), especially if a scrap of it had been left to simmer on a slab near enough the fire and had all its distillates vaporized. Only a clean and lumpy chunk of a substance like overcooked meat remains, but is too tough to be eaten even in the most desperate times; the blond boy had a distinct memory of a similarly tan-brown wad feigning as bait on a fish hook. The thought was too indistinct to attribute to any specific moment of his life, as it could have been from a dream, a movie, or from years and years ago.

Just before he could have deduced a use for this residual pig leather, a sound from outside, like a hollowed out tree trunk snapping, pulled his attention. The blond boy became distinctly aware of the fire, increasing in its size and its rage. Its whistling, crackling and stomping became impossible to ignore, reminiscent of a hearth. The thought of a fireplace brought warm memories, but these were ruined by the hypocritical nature of the flames that cooked his meals and those that presently surrounded him in a threatening siege. The boy's dithering fear of the heat turned to mortal terror when he heard feeble footsteps clambering around the bend behind the cave, towards him.

It wasn't sympathy for the suffering of others; he was too innocent and selfish to consider the innumerable injuries and deaths of the other boys who weren't close enough to shelter when the storm started. Nor was it the hypothetical thought of being trapped outside among the burning trees and tortured children. Young boys are dim, forgetful and live in the moment. They are too ignorant, not self-conscious enough to know that dwelling on assumptive fears does no good. The blond boy thought for himself; not only because he wasn't offered the chance for empathy. He thought of survival as he fled, and let himself become distracted when immolation stopped being imminent.

The blond boy decided for himself that out of the inferno had emerged a monster to make sure he would die, since the fire itself had failed to assure this. Trembling and sweating even more than minutes before, he reviewed at the stock on the floor. Knife, specs, spears. He picked up a spear and brandished it towards the cave mouth as he watched the thin shadow in front widen at a hysterical pace. The beast's shade settled into a solid shape and a naked little boy tumbled with it into the hollow, eyes shut tight and arms folded across his chest. Crying, the little one tripped himself up and fell down hard on the blond boy, his body avoiding the wielded spear by mere inches.

The blond one rolled the stick back onto its pile and recognized the boy as a fellow survivor. A feeling of fraternity shook him and tears began to flow anew. He embraced his derelict brother and the little boy hugged him back. The two of them crumpled into a slobbering, sobbing pile while the fire outside grew, spouting horrible foreign sounds. The boys held and grabbed at each other, neither wanting to be the other's guardian and each aching to be protected underneath the other one. Though somewhat comforted, this tumultuous struggle repeatedly exposed their sweaty skins to the biting air and hostile atmosphere, and they could find no harmony. They grunted and pushed further from the mouth and closer to each other, but the process slowed until they grudged into a lazy, selfish terror, but all before the fire engulfed their senses and fully attacked the environment around the cave.

The quivering lights of the fire beneath the setting sun flaunted their way over the apron, up the cliff and around the cave. They disrupted the shrivelling, shimmering shadows between falling branches, landing in swells on the stone floor, like one might see in a windy forest at midday, but gloomier. A silhouette obstructed the scene, moving stealthily and purposefully between the fire and the two naked boys embracing in the hollow. It transformed into a tall boy with long brown hair at the mouth of the cave. He drifted in wordlessly, his chin tilted slightly, both arms stretched out from his sides, palms facing up. His silence and careful footsteps inspired awe and respect from the two on the cave floor, suddenly conscious of how pitiful they looked.

The tall boy, confused and scared witless in an unintentionally concealed fashion, muttered aloud to himself, "Ohm…" as he had heard a wise old yogi say in the pictures, but was disappointed in saying this because it was not the word he had wanted to say, though it was close.

For the blond boy, this Indian incantation was close enough to bring back memories of home, and in the great hollowed rock he felt safety from the inferno. He let his mind associate this feeling with the cave and with the tall boy whose protection he sought. His feeling of longing became so great that he could convince himself that this was it, this was what he wanted. Ohm was so close to home that the blond boy's need for the latter became an easily suppressible desire, which he hid away. Instead he opted for the tall boy's comfort.

The other one, the little, frightened boy was stifled simultaneously by the fiery heat outside and by the biting cold inside. He heard, "Uhm," and was greatly discouraged by it, so he put his head down and wept. The tall boy, standing above the embracing pair, felt a wave of the coldness that lived in the walls of the spear-filled cave. He breathed out during a shiver to emit a hissed sibilant, easily mistaken for a soft hushing, as he knelt down to the warm bodies. They cried and nuzzled into him, the three of them sharing each other's warmth.

CHAPTER TWO: Crisp Leaves and Sparse Trees

Of course, the rain won in the end. The rain always comes last. It settled itself over the charred forest that it had rescued which, inarguably and perhaps unbelievably, remained a forest. The green smoke, an indicator of the damp, living flora, poor fuel for the fire, dissipated. It rose up to the clouds, or condensed by the wet sand on the beaches, where it rolled off the side and into the water, curling over itself with the undertow before sinking. The broken army of faded gray billows turned their heads from the ravaged, yet undefeated trees.

The island appeared autumnal except there were no leaves on the ground. The forest floor was instead littered with black, sticky mulch that bled from all its pores, the wet residue of a green bonfire soaked into displaced mud. An hour after the fire had extinguished, the rain ceased, and the mire that covered the island had since stopped fuming, and was on its way towards solidifying. Thousands of crisp sticks and several hollowed tree trunks emerged from mud in a sharp black line, surrounded by the crumbs of their fragmented bark, powdered leaves and the squashed, roasted fruit of certain trees.

And yet it was still unmistakably a forest. A vast number of trees stood as tall as before the fire, and one could still easily become lost among them. They were naked in every way. The leaves had fallen and so had the bark, except for small, black patches left on the trees that curled upwards and stayed attached, like hooks. Though their branches were fewer there was they still cast a thick darkness that prevented long-distance sight and enabled hiding, and pursuing. The island was, by no means, barren. The soil was almost certainly more fertile than ever. The burnt and blackened trees had suffered, but were still alive in thick but short shoots of dark brown hair on the rugged onyx head of the island. The fire had failed to shear the land clean, which is what the boys had expected to see upon leaving the cave, that they could stand on one beach and see all the way through to the other shore. In all real ways, their island had deteriorated. No longer did the trees grow big, soft bushels of leaves and sweet, low-hanging fruit. Their stripped branches high, the trees seemed taller than before, detaching and conjoining, twisting into each other and separating sideways and upwards into dark erratic segments that ended in points, like the outward frayed tails of a rat king, or a dead cluster of belly-up tarantulas. They could still get lost in this forest, and things could still hide in it. It was scary, even during the daytime, and would take a degree of patience to acquaint to it. Right then, it was dark, naked, wet, and smelled like charcoal and damp, mildewed rock. And it was noticeably colder.

The smoke and hot fog had rolled off the beaches by the time the first of them woke up. He easily lifted himself up, because no others were lying on top of him. The boy rubbed his eyes and yawned then rolled himself up and out of the hollow. Facing east, the sun had just climbed above the trees and into the tall boy's eyes, casting his shadow in front of the cave but not inside it. He first looked up, but the light blurred his view of the island, so he turned his head down to see the apron beneath the cliff, which crumbled out, towards the small, delicate rocky shore, to a narrow stretch of land that transformed from stone to burnt earth. This strip, the bridge, connected the lowest part of Castle Rock to the main island; the tall boy was dry and it was safe to look out over the island from his elevation. He screwed up his eyes and they adjusted.

There was something several feet from the bridge where there would have been a line on the ground separating the beach from the forest. But because the sand was mud, mud turned over and mixed with the burnt compost that slid down the angled shore, all the ground looked the same, and enough beachside trees had been felled to blur the line further. The beach looked more like a clearing within a dark, ravaged woods. The smaller shore, the beach on the other side of the bridge, was equally naked, but more revealingly because the bushes and creepers that clung to the low-hanging branches and dipped into the water had burnt up as quickly as the shrublings in the trees and forest floors. Because of the surrounding nakedness, the tall rock peninsula on which he stood felt more detached than ever. At the end of the bridge, between the two beaches, lay a wretched and poisoned scrap of earth, so scorched and blackened for which something more devastating than a forest fire must have been responsible. Lightning chose to ravage this particular spot during the storm that night.

On this spot stood a little boy, obscured by black sweat and ash. A birthmark, that looked like a black-eye flashed bright violet through the dirt on his face, and seemed to occupy much of his cheek. His long hair, which was visibly ginger beneath some weeks' worth of dirt and an evening of soot, was padded against his head due to the rain and sweat.

"Hullo!" he yelped up to the tall boy and waved, "Some day, yesterday was, huh?"

The tall boy, standing on Castle Rock at the mouth of the cave, looked up to the sky, stretched out his arms and yawned again. He looked back at the ginger-haired boy on the limit of the ruined beach.

"Yup," said the tall one, "First it was hot, then it's real cold. Were you in the forest all night long?"

The boy on the beach shrugged and looked around, pivoting on one heel. "I dunno. Prob'ly not. It was bright and hot, couldn't get any sleep."

"Say, don't I know you?"

"Maybe. Do you know my mum?"

"I dunno. Is she Auntie Bettie… in Birmingham?"

"I dunno."

The two of them became silent and their respective gazes scattered. The tall one looked up at the ruined forest behind the son of his mother's cousin, Auntie Becky, who actually lived in Nottingham, though neither of them would ever remember that. The soot-covered boy walked forward and stumbled across the bridge, onto the apron beneath the cliff. He looked up and could see the top of the cave in which his third-cousin had slept the previous night.

The three others from the cave were tired from lack of sleep, but were immediately awestruck by the forest as they slipped into the marked boy's view next to the tall boy, mouths hanging agape. As these three emerged, others came from the forest. The boys appeared and then disappeared between the obstructing boughs of the forest. They seemed aimless and confused, but one by one they materialized between black trunks and drifted into the open, staring around and at the rocky cliff beyond the end of the island. Castle Rock brought them inviting, pleasant memories. They were drawn to the warmth like a swarm of flies to a bowl of over-ripened fruit.

This comfortable recollection settled especially in the tall boy, whose head of hair poked well above the blond and two black ones standing to his side. He perceived the rock as perfection. There's an especially resilient quality about stone, its immortality, its resistance to change. This is evidenced by its fortitude versus the fire and the storm the night before. As the tall one only just began to notice, the four who had slept in the hollow, who now stood high on the warm sunny cliff, were more well-rested and able-bodied, as opposed to the tired and shivering boys who came from the woods. Stone is strong, sheltering. He bent over and laid on the edge of the rock on his belly. He held out a hand to his cousin on the apron, though he was perfectly capable of climbing up the cliff on his own, had he wished to do so.

"Come up here. I'll make us all a fire."

The marked boy took his hand and climbed. The tall boy reached down to help each boy who came across the bridge to the apron. He led all them into the cave, where they assembled a pile of thin scraps of twigs and dry leaves that they found there. He took the specs and a handful of dry leaves to the mouth of the cave. Using what can only be described as instinct, he encouraged a flame and transferred it to the pile of sticks inside. Though this earned no applause, no thanks, no warm smiles, he felt appreciated and useful. A memory in the back of his head confirmed that he was acting correctly, he was doing what had to be done according to the great leaders that had come before him. He knew that certain things were right, necessary, and other things were wrong and should not be tolerated such as the current state of the assembly in the cave. The boys, still frightened and absent-minded, were silent, so the tall boy tried to focus their attention.

"Some night, last night was, eh?"

A few nods, but all eyes were on the growing fire.

"But look on the bright side…" the tall boy said as he crawled to the back of the hollow. He returned to the circle about the fire with a used charcoal stick, "It can never burn again." He threw the stick in the campfire. The flames bent under it, poignantly.

"It won't?" asked the little boy who had slept in the cave last night.

"Why not?"

"Oh, there's smoke in my eyes!"

"I'm hungry…"

The tall one spoke up again, silencing the rest.

"Nope, it'll never get fire again," he said, "'cause there's nothing left to burn. Wood needs to be fresh. S'why we can't start a fire with only black wood."

As if to demonstrate his point, the black stick among the flames slowly began to catch, but much slower than the other sticks. None of the boys were paying attention.

"I bet we're all hungry now. And some of you are prob'ly thirsty, too. There's a pool on the beach, I think, where we can get unsalty water. For food, I think there's some Piggy in the smaller cave, further down Castle Rock, but we shouldn't -"

"What's a Piggy?"

"Piggy used to blow the shell thing."

"No, Piggy helped us get those hairy things."

"Say, where is Piggy?"

"Shuddup! Piggy is the hairy thing. There's one in the lil' cave where we make the big fires but you can't eat stuff that wasn't refrigedated, it'll make you sick. But I'm sure there's some fruits somewhere round here lying on the ground, and later we'll go -"

"I want Piggy!"

"One time, I caught a Piggy all by myself!"

"Yeah, yeah, Piggy!"

Two of them jumped up from the circle and ran out of the cave to find the spoiled Piggy. The unrest spread through the assembly and they all began struggling upwards and out onto the stone plateau. Even the three who had slept in the hollow with the tall left him alone in front of the fire. The newly awakened crowd clambered around the bend and into a smaller hollow that's mouth was facing seaward. After being thoroughly ignored, the tall boy felt hopeless, as well as lost and confused. The sensation of an impending end came upon him. He looked around at the burning fire and scattered sticks, and up at the ceiling. He remembered the time he had once been ordered to spend the night up there as lookout, to make sure they weren't attacked by Piggies, ghosts, snakes or the Beast. No one could ever be bothered to do that now, considering their indifference towards his attempt at authority.

He looked at the broken spectacles and the knife beside them. Everything was hopeless, and this knife is useless, and he couldn't think of a reason why it existed until he turned it blade-side to the stone floor and dragged it back; it left a clear demarcation in the rock. Aware of the long brown hair plastered to his face with sweat, he grabbed it in a handful and swiped the knife sharply between the fistful and his scalp. The hair resisted shearing but the tall boy persisted and sawed back and forth until he could feel some beginning to fall out. A few lonely curls fell to the stone floor beside the fire. He dropped the knife next to the specs threw and the hair into the fire. He exited the cave with hair-scented smoke obscuring the entrance.

The tall boy turned and walked down the plateau towards the other, the populated cave. His hair, tangled and divided in all directions, messy and filthy, was substantially shorter because of his persistence in cutting it. He had odd bangs and long wavy strands hanging randomly from his head. Much of the hair growing behind his temples and above his forehead had hardly been cut at all. Since he could not see his reflection here, he proudly marched around the edge of Castle Rock and into the cave, imagining himself to possess a long forgotten quality which he couldn't even recall in his most recent leaders, but was important nonetheless. Maybe those old leaders weren't always right. That's probably why they're gone, he figured, because the fire or the Beast or the thunder, or whatever ate them up. He did not know what became of them. He was absent when Captain Douglas visited the island, when Ralph promised him and his crew that there was no one left. He now knew it was time for a newer, smarter boy to take the helm. Maybe those other boys are prepared to go around with wicked paints on their faces and long hair on their shoulders, but at least one of them knows what's to be done.

He entered the hollow to a mess of hungry boys devouring a dead old Piggy. A few of them whispered to each other until they all recognized the clean cut hair of the tall boy at the mouth. Some boys backed up, others advanced until they collectively took the shape of an open circle within the irregularly wide oval shaped cave. The tall boy sat down to complete the circle, and they all stopped eating out of an implied respect.

"Alrighty, first thing's first." The tall boy said. "We're a good group of Englishmen and we oughta act like one, and we oughta have names."

He was met by silence. The boys looked around and at their handfuls of meat but not one eye met the tall boy's. This disheartened him, but he didn't give up. As he was about to articulate his name, he found himself only pronouncing the "E" vowel in his head, as well as the guttural "R" sound. He did not know how to put these pieces together to form a name. He joined the sounds and vocalized what came first to mind, though it wasn't exactly what he had hoped for it to sound like aloud.

"My name's Peter." The tall boy told the assembly. He turned his head to the boy with the purple birthmark sitting a few boys down. "What's your name?"

The marked boy shrugged shamefully and looked down, and Peter sighed. He couldn't let this apathy towards names go on through the rest of them.

"Does anybody have a name?" He asked.

Listening intently, the blond boy remembered that he did in fact have a name. He even remembered what it was. It came back to him clearly, not as if it was forgotten but simply misplaced and waiting to be found again.

"My name's… Clark…"

"Hullo, Clark, I'm Peter. Who else has a name?"

"I'm Philip!" said a thick boy in the back.

"My name is Timothy!" called a tall blond boy, though he wasn't as tall as Peter or as blond as Clark.

While the crowd shouted out proper nouns they believed to be theirs, Harold saw an opportunity. He always hated his name. He instantly remembered this loathing once the subject of names was brought up. Taken from a relative he never met, sounding like a compound of "hair," and "old," he used to protest and contest and fight over this with his mother to change it, or at least to let him be called Harry, never to any avail. Forgetting his name for good, Harold recalled the moments he had spent alone in thought, coming up with better ones, as he spoke up.

"My name is Dingo!"

"My name's Charlie Conrad!" yelled the littlest one, whose face was still tainted with smeared paint, fully believing this to be the name his parents had given him. It was not. He wasn't even close, but none of the others noticed, and so it wasn't of any consequence.

The swell of outcries slowed into a low humming murmur of boys introducing themselves to each other as if it were the first they'd met. Peter began to feel quite proud of himself and his intelligent initiative. He had no plans for the future and many of his memories beyond the great fire were too blurry to learn from. Peter and the boys shared collective memory of someone much taller than them, telling them what to do to survive. The assembly ate slowly and talked only between bites as they had been trained to by teachers and parents but had forgotten about during their time on the island before the fire. Peter knew that as long as no one minded having a bit of bits of food sprayed on them once in a while this was just a pointless and repetitive exercise like the rote memorization of rhymes and grammatical exceptions. But the Beast is in the details, and it's the individually small but numerous petty tasks that make up the greater order of the way in which things should be. Having names and refraining from conversation with one's mouth full are the basis for an order that hasn't yet been present during the boys' stay on the island. The past leaders had forgotten this and now they're gone because they couldn't control themselves, and consequently could not control the Beast. Peter knew that names are necessary to uphold the order of things. Peter knew that refraining from conversation when one's mouth is full is equally necessary though it isn't always quite clear why. It is simply the way in which things should be. For why else would their parents and their teachers and the policemen repeat these laws to them until it was second nature? It's how things are, and the failed reigns of Ralph and Jack were proof enough to Peter.

CHAPTER THREE: Water in the Beach

"Everyone up, it's bathing time!"

The big cave grumbled and slowly arose. The boys yawned and stretched and reluctantly rolled over and up. The body warmth in the hollow siphoned out in a begrudging single file, leaving those still trying to sleep cold and alone. It was cold enough sleeping in the hollow ever since Peter enforced the No Touching rule. The cave emptied itself of naked bodies and poured them down the slope, onto the black island. The party marched along the beach, headed by the Peter, Timothy, Philip and the marked boy. The four of them shared the task of assuring that no one takes to the dirty ocean because the Beast lurks in there as well as on the mountain. The boys were grateful for this protection, save Dingo and Clark, who seldom voiced their cynical doubt towards Peter and his rules. The group arrived at the crystal clear pool situated in the beach.

"Now everyone, clothes off!"

They all looked at each other and at their own naked bodies confusedly; they started laughing and turned to Peter inquisitively.

"It's not funny!" Peter told them. "It's practice, for when we do got clothes. Everyone pretend to take off your clothes!"

The boys kept laughing but complied. They mimed the untying of shoe laces, the removal of socks and pretended to unbutton and undress their shirts and pants. One little boy, who claimed his name to be Stanley, called out to another as he was make-believe undressing and told him he was throwing his shoe, and then Stanley threw his arm forward in the other boy's direction.

"Ha! You missed me!"

"Nuh uh, I hit ya square in the nose! If it were real you'd be bleeding!"

"I'm throwing both my shoes at you! And they both hit you."

"No, I caught your shoes, and I'm throwing them in the ocean."

"You better not!"

A third little boy thought that someone had found the shoes he'd lost the day he came to the island and was trying to steal them. He picked up a glob of sooty mud from the ground which revealed the wet, familiar sand underneath. He lobbed the handful through the air; when Stanley was struck by it in the eye, he started wailing. Stanley dropped the imaginary shoes. Going against his initial instinct to sit down and whine, something told him that a defenseless display of emotion was no longer an appropriate reaction. He hadn't seen his mother or father, nor a schoolteacher, headmaster, not a policeman around in the longest time for him to cry to. So Stanley followed his second impulse, though as he began running and approached his attacker this impulse began to feel more natural and he was almost surprised that he had even considered not fighting back at all. The sand-thrower's mind did not at all entertain the possibility of repercussion or of any consequence to his actions besides perhaps having his shoes returned and was thoroughly surprised.

Stanley, covered from head to belly with black mud, jumped forward at the offender and knocked both of them down. Stanley sat on the boy's stomach to keep him down while forcefully clawing at his face with untrimmed nails. The sand-thrower's face started to bleed as the skin tore on his cheeks, forehead and lips. He became terribly bruised on both eyes. Stanley forgot the sand stuck in his eyes. He even began to smile out of enjoyment. He missed hunting Piggies, but that was hard and Piggies never did anything to him to deserve being hunted. Stanley relentlessly scratched the little boy's face without worrying about lingering damage or infection until he felt himself being lifted above the boy with the cut-up face. He was turned around to face Peter staring at him furiously.

"The first rule," Peter yelled, "Is never, never hurt anybody! And you just hurt somebody!"

"I'm sorry," he said vacantly.

"You coulda killed him, Percy, and all you got to say is 'sorry'?"

"My name's not Percy!"

"We told you, your name's Percy, I remember you."

"I'm not Percy, I'm Stanley!"

"You're Percy! You lied to me, you hurt somebody else, and you're all dirty. That's three rules you broke already, Percy, and we oughta punish you right now! Philip oughta turn you over and drop you right on your head for what you did. But he won't, 'cause we're good people and we're gonna give you one more chance." He looked about, "I hope everyone hears me!"

The boys were staring at Peter. They nodded to show they understood him and then all stood attentively in front of him by the pool. Philip put Percy back down and went to stand next to Peter. It was true, as Percy learnt, there were no parents or teachers or police here. There was only Peter, and with him there was Philip and Timothy and the boy with the purple eye, who carried around a spear and, as far as Percy was concerned, was not afraid to use it. Percy stood up in front of the pool next to the boy whose face was covered in tears and blood, looking up at him and sobbing.

"Alright, now," Peter told them, "We all oughta be clean if we wanna make it, and I shouldn't have to tell you why. If you don't wash up you'll be dirty, and you know what else is dirty, don't you? Piggies; they're filthy, and if you don't keep yourself clean you'll turn into a Piggy. They'll come at night and take you away and you'll get all fat and hairy, walking on your feet and hands. One day one of us'll be out there hungry with a spear and by accident he might pluck you off, cut you up, roast and eat you. Cleanliness is the difference between us and a Piggy. They're everywhere, and they're nasty and mean and angry and gross and the Beast absolutely hates them, so we can't be like them or near them. I might rule this place, but it belongs to the Piggies, do you understand?"

None of them understood but they all nodded.

"Perfect. And if we appease the Beast, and its glory, then one day we will all be exalted and all the Piggies will be transformed into smoked honey-baked hams. And we might be taken from here and to Ohm. Alright, now jump in!"

Philip and Timothy hopped into the pool and swam to the other side to make room for the others. One by one the boys jumped into the water, shivering from the initial cold, until only Peter and the scratched boy were left on the beach.

"Well, aren't you gonna go in?"

The scratched boy didn't say anything but shrugged and turned a bit away from Peter's gaze.

"Get in the pool. Or else the Piggies will get ya."

Still nothing.

"And if the Piggies come for you then we're all in trouble."

He turned his head and ignored Peter completely. Peter approached the scratched one and stuck his hands between the boy's folded arms. He grabbed the boy by the armpits, leaned back and lifted him up. He began to struggle. His face still hurting him badly, the scratched boy started crying from the pain, whining in fear. Peter stifled this with an indignant scream and threw the boy, with his arms and legs flailing in the air, into the pool with the rest of them. Peter jumped in after him. The cold water pressed down on the scratched boy's eye sockets and seeped into all the cuts, stinging furiously at everywhere Percy clawed. The mud on his back washed off into the water along with his sweat and grime. He was clean again.

Ever since they were rudely woken up in the cave that morning, Clark and Dingo had been watching Peter's leadership tactics, silently disapproving. Younger than Peter, but still older than the rest, they did not recall the rules once taught to them by authority figures, that Peter was now enforcing. They were not naïve enough to follow him without question. The two of them exchanged glances, in the cave, on the beach and in the pool, nodding without moving and agreeing without speaking. The connection they shared expressed their mutual disdain for the inconvenient laws Peter and his big friends made and they wondered what gave Peter the right in the first place to decided what's what. They both wanted change and understood the other had the same motive.

Clark swam over to Dingo and the two of them rested their arms on the beach behind them, floating side by side. They were sufficiently isolated because the rest of the boys in the pool were dispersed and many had already left.

"I hate Peter," Dingo whispered.

"He's too bossy."

"His rules are silly and he's stupid!"

"I don't like his rules either."

"He's useless, all he wants is for us to be useless like him and do whatever he says and never have any fun."

"Well, that's not true, he's done some good things. He protected me in the cave and he stopped that boy from hurting the other one."

"Bu he's crazy."

"He is crazy. I bet you he's gonna do something really stupid one day and then he'll be gone, and then no one'll stop us from scratching each other."

"He's always doing and saying stupid stuff, and it'll be me that's makes him go away. If somebody hurt me I'd just hurt 'em back."

"He won't be in charge forever."

"Good."

Their conversation ended, each of them believing that the other was in agreement and that a plan was in the making. Dingo leaned back and thought about the big'un that used to be their leader a long, long time ago. He was taller and stronger and smarter than Peter, better in all ways. His world made sense. They would hunt Piggies because it was fun, make fires because they were hungry, drink because they were thirsty and sleep because they were tired. There weren't any strange rules made up to confuse him. There were spears to kill with, a knife to sharpen with, specs for a fire and the big rock hollow to keep them dry and safe. If Dingo was in charge, things would be just like they used to be, except for one part of the reign of the big'uns.

Dingo didn't like the Beast. The concept of it is peculiar, preposterous and horrifying. As purely and as dryly logical it was of Dingo to outright refute the existence of the Beast, his reasoning was groundless and absurd. He was disturbed by how easily his world can be changed in the hands of one leader to another and how quickly everyone, himself included, could forgive and forget the terrible things that happened. Dingo saw the futility of looking at the world from an objective angle, because all perspectives are biased and transient. He decided that there was no naturally ordained order of what should happen, nor was there a greater order of how all things are meant to be. Everything that exists only exists in the minds of people, according to Dingo, and to mandate how something should be is fruitless. Dingo didn't like the Beast, ergo, there was no Beast.

"How could the Beast be in the water and in the sky?" Dingo asked.

"I dunno. It might be everywhere."

"It also might be nowhere."

"Maybe, but I don't think that's the part of it that really matters."

"Then what really matters, anyways?"

After they left the pool, the Clark and Dingo swept the beach for stray fruits that survived both the Great Fire and several days' worth of hungry scavengers. Once they'd eaten enough scraps to stay satisfied for the day, they joined the others who were chasing each other and play-fighting with sticks on the beach, on Castle Rock, in the part of the forest where the sun shone brightly between the limbs and in the burnt open space before the bridge.

Percy was still sitting on the edge of the pool where he had uncovered a big patch of sand under the black dirt. All day long, he built sandcastles, imagining big, wealthy royal families inhabiting them; dukes and duchesses living in castles on the Thames with princes and princesses and her Majesty the Queen herself visiting them, eating a five-course meal, discussing the welfare of England. Amidst the political discourse, a great big fist came down from the sky and pummeled the castle into a heap, sliding it into pool. It sank to the bottom of the pool where the wet sand of the castle mixed with black sludge. Across the pool, the boy with the scratched face climbed out of the water and ran back over to Castle Rock.

CHAPTER FOUR: Gift from the Darkness

Charlie crouched in the middle of the forest, feet in the congealed mass of ash and mulch he came to know as earth. The early morning sun striped his face with serpentine shadows that flickered slowly in the breeze. The wind blew as strongly as it did before the Great Fire but the trees were silent. The decorous rustling of leaves which used to hang in the air, if not overshadowed by other sounds, was gone. In its place was an eerie and unnatural whistling of the wind as it skipped from branch to branch and slithered between boughs, louder every instant until it was upon him. It was the strange sound of trees in mourning.

There were birds, too, in the air, and Charlie was certain of this. If several boys had made it out of the burning forest alive, it was only logical that a few other creatures had also survived. Therefore the Piggy, second only to the Beast, the most mean and vile thing on the island, must still be alive somewhere in this place. No one had caught a Piggy since the disappearance of the big'un with the painted face. Little Charlie sought to prove himself to Peter and the other hungry boys so went hunting all by himself, a primitive hunter armed with a sharp wooden stick.

His face was clean; he washed himself in the pool on the beach as Peter directed they all do, twice daily. There was no more make-up. Peter says make-up is for girls and Indians. Charlie wouldn't know where and how to get make-up on himself anyway. So he stood nude in the forest, nothing to cover his sun-reddened skin but his long, dirty shock of hair which, from a disconnected point of view, made quite a suiting and functional camouflage. The nakedness wouldn't last for too much longer, according to Peter, for they would soon find a way to turn burnt hide of Piggies into clothes. Though Charlie couldn't quite picture clothes in his mind, he remembered and understood the concept of concealing oneself. Charlie became aware of all the sharp branches jutting at him which he'd previously ignored, as well as the dirty scratches all over him from running naked through the woods in the past. This would be no more. All they needed were clothes, so someone needed to catch a Piggy.

The scent Charlie smelled and the noise he heard were familiar, but he hadn't discerned them acknowledged. Even the way in which he sensed the presence of some wild Piggy, now trying to acclimate to its changed home, was nothing new. It was a long forgotten and bred-out intuition that faded over generations. It felt foreign, almost incorrect, only half-remembered; it was like his name. He wielded his spear with both hands. To be fully concealed by the forest, the Piggy had to be moving subtly several yards away. Fortunately, it was neither. The dark and dirty pink fur revealed itself to Charlie from the corner of his eye and he swung around without hesitation. He pivoted his body over one foot, but only for an instant before he was in a silent, sprinted pursuit. The Piggy could smell him, Charlie knew, but he in turn, could discern the nervous sweat beads falling from the animal's forehead, becoming lost in its fur. It lumbered between trunks and over fallen boughs, trying to form a plan in its tiny instinct-driven brain. The Piggy was running but couldn't run forever, not even for more than a few minutes when its life is on the line. Charlie was persistent and refused to tire. He followed the Piggy around, over and under the wooden obstacles obstructing his goal, through forgotten Piggy-trails diminished by the fire. As the creature began to tire, it slowed down and Charlie slowed, too, to match his prey. He wouldn't be tricked into thinking he'd already won because he was still many, many yards behind and maybe more than an hour from catching it. Charlie slowed instead of using all his strength right away and he knew that if he followed the virtues (he was pretty sure Peter taught him) like patience, persistence and bravery, he would be victorious in the end.

This was not an instance of life or death for Charlie. The boys could nibble on the remains of the previous Piggy for a little while until the fruits start growing again; the trees near the beach already have a few green buds sprouting from the tips of their branches. In the moment of this hunt he was mostly unconcerned about the presence of the Beast sitting on the mountaintop watching him from the other end of the island, waiting for a show of slaughtered Piggy or at least a dead little boy. Peter's new rules did not obligate him to hunt, instead it was a primeval longing that Charlie could not ignore.

The pursuit had slowed to a crawl. Feelings that Charlie had thought exclusive to humans manifested themselves in the shivering Piggy, a spear's throw away. Like anxiety. He imagined the Piggy knowing what was about to happen to it, even though Charlie himself couldn't completely understand what he was about to do, being as young as he was. But he knew, and he imagined the Piggy knowing, that it was going to hurt. The sweat was falling off his nose and matting the hair to his face. Charlie hardly had the energy to pounce. He would if he had to, but his longing wouldn't be satisfied until the Piggy collapsed on its belly and let him kill it. Hunting alone is different than in a pack. There's less running and hollering but it ends the same.

The forest seemed to suddenly open up and the desperately weary animal found itself facing the steep incline of the mountain. It turned around to face its stalker, now only a few feet away, and uttered an incomprehensible grunt that Charlie could only assume to be sheer, embodied panic. It was different from burning ants with a magnifying glass and the Piggies he had chased along the clearings with a pack of armed big'uns, because he was exhausted, alone and, in the end, looked it right in its eyes. He came out from the forest and stood in front of the creature's gleaming tusks. Charlie plunged the spear into its back with both hands and pulled it out immediately. The Piggy tumbled over and rolled onto its back, opening itself up for a heavy-handed stab through the heart. He was triumphant.

Charlie Conrad laughed loudly and lauded his victory, but the feeling faded when he remembered how far he was from Castle Rock, how heavy the body of a grown Piggy is, how tired he was from the day he spent sweating and following. His spear dulled, Charlie was hungry, sleepy and susceptible to attack from all angles. A vengeful Piggy could come tromping through the woods at any moment and stomp over his father's killer. In a fundamentally different way from how he felt in the cave during the Great Fire, he was paranoid. In the way he imagined Piggies felt, in every second of every day, Charlie was terrified. In every direction was something bigger, stronger and angrier than Charlie and this made him empathise with the Piggy he had just taken. It was late into the afternoon and the forest would soon begin shading him more heavily. Charlie averted his eyes from his kill and looked up the mountainside.

"What is there to do?"

He grabbed onto a protruding ledge behind him and hauled himself up. Charlie manipulated his feet up a few slanted edges in what was more of a crawl than a climb as the dead Piggy turned into a pink speck and the forest an irregular sheet of black sandpaper floating in still water. He still couldn't see Castle Rock to tell how far he was from home. The view from his perspective didn't reassure him. He climbed higher until he could see for miles and miles in any direction.

On the top of the mountain was a small flat rock which was littered with the ash of past fires. A swarm of flies hummed and surrounded the boy but mostly congregated on a round little object on the rock right in front of him. Charlie swatted at the flies with both hands and squatted down for a closer look. It was familiar to him, like something he had seen in an encyclopedia, enough that he could place a name on it and remember what it's used for. Charlie got on his hands and knees and slowly edged his face closer to the aviator's helmet, besieged by flies. With one hand Charlie turned it over. A smudged visor obscured his view of a skull, picked clean by bugs and bleached white by the western sun. Charlie thought it looked like the head bone of a Piggy, except rounder and smaller. Long ago when it was still covered by skin, it became detached from the body to which it belonged by the incessant chewing of greedy flies. Its empty eye hollows of the dead pilot stared listlessly into Charlie's. It sounded like Ralph, or perhaps Jack when it spoke.

"You ought to be awful proud of yourself, you know that?"

Charlie blinked hard, "… Th- thanks."

"Where would we all be without the men like you, huh? The politicians, the artists, the bankers and the truck drivers, they'd all starve to death if it weren't for you. That, or they'd drive themselves mad, each of 'em on their own, everyone running around, stabbing without looking, you know? Dog eat dog, every man for himself, do or die, fight or flight! You know?"

He nodded.

"There's not enough room on this island for everyone to be a dog. There's only enough room for you. Everything you see here is yours, while the sheep you feed are crammed on the big 'ole rock way over there on the other end of the island. Any less space and they'd probably kill each other. If they took up more, you'd be fully within your right to hunt 'em down for trespassing, like they were Piggies. And that's all Piggies are, right? Thoughtless, filthy trespassers who haven't met you yet."

"… Yes," Charlie whispered.

"The sheep don't know what you're capable of. That's why they aren't all afraid of you yet. That's why they hang around the beaches, too, there's so many damn sheep there. You know how sheep only hunt in packs, don't you? No? Well, they don't anymore, do they?"

"No."

"That's right. It's your forest, not the sheep's, not the Piggy's. You're the hunter, you're the dog. You took it all by yourself and nobody can take it back. It's rightfully yours, isn't it? You earned it, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"Exactly. Now, here's the difference between them and you: You kill Piggies, if they let you. Sheep kill you if you let them. Got it? But you can't go around killing sheep 'cause they hunt in packs, remember. Sheep are strong together, but they're also weak together. It depends if they're angry or scared or hungry. Don't make 'em angry or scared or hungry. Got it?"

"Yeah."

"By itself, a single sheep is as ignorant as anything. Together, they're not much smarter, but they're functional. That's why the word sheep is plural. 'Cause a lone sheep is a dead sheep. Each time one leaves, the big brain they all share gets a little bit smaller, and that'll make 'em scared. You don't want 'em scared, but one-on-one they don't stand a chance against you."

"Yeah, they don't!"

"Not even a little bit. The island is yours, but don't tell that to the sheep. They already know it but don't like to talk about it."

"That's right, the island's mine!"

"Always has been, always will be!"

"Always!"

"You make me awful proud, Charlie."

Charlie dropped the helmet when he realized he was holding it. It rolled to the side and the skull faced away from him. The flies swarmed back into view as if they had been hiding, and congregated back to their father. The white helmet reflected the orange and red of the setting sun. Without watching the sunset directly, Charlie slid backwards onto hands and knees and descended the gradual slope mountain without looking. He drifted back into the forest of charred twigs, completely unbothered by the sun. He dropped onto even ground, closer to the level of the ocean and further from the Father of the Flies' perch up above him. Charlie came up the dead Piggy before him, which luckily hadn't yet been discovered by animals, bugs or flies. He watched it for a second with his head tilted and his hands on his hips. Charlie flicked the spear protruding from its chest but it didn't budge.

Charlie grabbed the Piggy's hind legs by its hooves and dragged them through the darkened forest, its shadows no longer interrupted by sunlight. He heaved the carcass. It began to slide with him with surprising ease, leaving a thick trail of disturbed earth where the body had been pulled. Distorted in an uncanny crouch, he stepped backwards, slowly dragging several days' worth of meat with him up to the hungry group of boys at Castle Rock, all the way on the other end of Charlie's rugged and dim island.

Peter built a fire in the big cave and the boys brought blackened sticks and logs to him. The fire burned weakly but Peter promised that new wood would begin growing soon enough. At least it kept the darkness out.

"Our campfires remind us of the Great Fire the Beast subjected us to. Lest we forget."

"Lest we forget."

Dingo wondered to himself why Peter had decided to change everything about what the last leader did except the Beast. He surmised that Peter only wanted to scare them. Peter continued speaking.

"Appease it and ward it off. Of course, this little fire wouldn't stop the Beast if it really wanted to come in here but that's not the point."

As Peter spoke a shout from outside echoed into the hollow's walls. The boys inside rumbled with fear and cowered to the back of the cave while Peter stood up and assured them there was nothing to worry about. He and Philip left and could be heard clambering down the slope. After a few minutes of anxious silence the footsteps from outside became nearer. The assembly shivered in unison, certain that whatever was coming towards them was not Peter. A voice came from around the corner.

"Charlie Conrad has been to the mountain!" Peter yelled triumphantly.

He, Charlie and Philip came into view, dragging a carcass into the hollow. Peter put his arm around Charlie's neck and faced the cave.

"Like I already told you," Peter said, "We should never, never hurt anybody, because it makes the Beast angry. There are some things about the Beast that you won't understand, like how it hates when we eat with our mouths open, but it's okay because I understand. Even though the Beast hates Piggies, he also hates it when you hurt anybody else, even Piggies. That's why there'll be no more Piggy hunting, except by Charlie Conrad, who will bring us the meat because he isn't afraid of making the Beast angry… Because Charlie Conrad is the Beast! Hooray!"

"Hooray!"

"Yay!"

"Oh, Charlie!"

Peter began clapping his hands rhythmically and was joined by his three friends and Charlie, then the whole cave clapped along and stood up. They all danced around the fire in single file behind Peter, clapping, hopping and chanting Charlie's name. Every boy sang and danced, Dingo and Clark included. The boy with the marked face put down his spear and the boy with the scratched face ignored his pain and danced along. Their chanting bounced around the walls of the hollow and flowed out wildly onto the island, its echoes uninterrupted by the leaves that used to dress the forest, instead running between the trees and between their branches like a relentless hunter. The dogs were satiated for the night and the sheep were fearless because they were full, warm and felt safe. The Piggy's head lay sideways on the floor, its eyelids droopy but open, silently watching the display before it until the boys tired and fell asleep, leaving a foot of buffer between them.

CHAPTER FIVE: Spears in the Sand

This Piggy, Charlie's second of the day, collapsed from exhaustion before him and looked up into his eyes, as all Piggies seem to do for whatever reason before they're made done with. The dullness of its eyes, the lack of any light reflecting from the black of its eyes, showed Charlie that it had the same resignation to life, but this time there seemed to be something hidden in its gaze. Though the feeling only lasted for a second, Charlie felt as if the Piggy was laughing at him and that its death, as well as the whole hunt leading up to it, was nothing but a charade meant to confuse him. The Piggy thought he was a fool, just a silly little boy; even though Charlie might think that he rules this burnt charcoal of an island, it still does, and always will, belong to the Piggies. The feeling quickly vanished and left only indignation. He wielded his spear.

"You've got to be crazy."

He lunged and pierced the Piggy through the back of its neck, so deep it bled out the other side. Charlie withdrew his spear and a quick spurt of red sprayed onto his hands and torso. He kicked the Piggy with his heel and it didn't react, besides a persistent ripple echoing through its fat. With each instance of movement, the black bars cast by the spider-leg branches jiggled over the body like anxious hands of an invisible intervener trying to awaken it. The animal settled deep into the ground and stared at the hunter's feet with unblinking and unseeing eyes. The pink skin of the Piggy, visible between the shadows, was interrupted by the silhouette of a blackbird between the boughs, directly above the scene. This witness saw the outcome of the inaudible atrocity and passed over it like the wind, expressing no judgement and dismissing the whole affair as an inevitability of life.

The spot of black on the Piggy's back and in the sky vanished from Charlie's view and mind to be replaced by the equally dark trees. Spear in hand; he abandoned the carcass. Charlie knew the forest well enough at this time to find it again later. He looked up and could barely see the body of the sun, despite all of its warmth. He crawled on his hands and knees, grasping the spear with one hand. He glanced back at his last kill, which was facing in the other direction so that Charlie found himself looking at its behind.

"There's millions of Piggies. They've been here long before the Dogs and they'll be here long after," the Piggy told him.

Charlie lost control of his wrath and screamed without fear. He turned and jumped on the kill. He dropped the spear to the black earth and in a flurry of yellowed teeth, jagged nails and sheer force tore the curly pink tail from the Piggy's passive body. Charlie could imagine its soul squealing. As the bloody thing fell from his mouth to the ground in a wet thud, he thought he could hear the Piggy's pain echoing into the real world, sounding like the faraway horn of a steamboat, distant not only by miles, but by weeks, yet it was crisp in his ears. This sound was the spirit or driving force behind the life of this Piggy skidding across the waters and sinking into the ocean along with the doomed boat. The horn faded away but the apparition of a long-gone ship remained. Charlie was aware of this boat he must have heard but had disregarded either out of apathy or fear.

During this confusion a sound both came and vanished. During this new instant of recognition, he could feel nothing but pity for the officers, sailors and big'uns trapped on that vessel. Like the boys on the beach, they would never again hunt a Piggy from the desire, not the need, for meat. Charlie felt safer now that this boat of unlawful, uncaring and unapologetic intruders was gone because only one dog may sit upon the mountaintop.

The cave shot awake with a scream that passed from one frightened little boy to the next. Peter threw himself into the sun, hands clamped over ears to escape it. One after the other they followed him. Boys filed out and down to the bridge, some crawling on all fours. As they spread out in front of the forest and on the apron, the sound focused into a whine, reflecting off the stone walls inside. Peter pushed the confused and tired party onto the beach. He and his three boys hurried back up the slope to take care of the crying boy inside. From the apron below, they couldn't see into the cave but watched as the four of them disappeared into it.

After a minute, Timothy and Philip emerged and descended the slope. Once down below, the two of them stood still and silently watched the pack, sitting on the spot where the lightning had struck. Suddenly, Phillip sprinted forward wordlessly and jumped into the group. He threw his body into the crowd and struck several of them onto their backs but his weight was focused and remained on Percy. Philip pulled the little boy up by his wrist and dragged him onto the apron, his legs and other arm thrashing in the air. Timothy leaned over and grabbed Percy's other hand. He pointed to the cave.

"Peter's with a boy in there who's very, very sick."

Percy didn't listen, but instead continued to hopelessly struggle. The boys who had been knocked over sat up again and listened to Timothy.

"His face is all cut up and the cuts are very, very dirty… and there's things coming out of the cuts… and he's crying."

"Who's crying?"

"I got cuts too!"

"Is it Piggy?"

"Shuddup! He's very, very sick and Peter says he'll prob'ly never get good again 'cause the doctor's not here. And the reason he's sick is 'cause of Percy."

"My name's Stanley! Stanley!"

"Your name's Percy and you're in big trouble, Percy!"

"Ha! Percy's in trouble!"

"Percy's no good."

"Percy threw his shoes at me!"

The little boy kept pulling and tugging at the hands grasped around his wrists and kicking at the boys' feet. The roaring assembly of onlookers before him was as indifferent to his suffering as he was to that of the one with the scratched face, nursing a gangrenous infection beneath his eyelids. Percy was too young and too selfish to feel sympathy towards the boy he attacked, yet expected it from others. This instinct replaced the behaviour taught by teachers and parents to do unto others as he would have others do unto him. This moral lesson was gone. Also gone was the newly formed radical freedom that Percy, among others, had adopted, because of the absence of policemen or headmaster around every corner. Percy finally understood that even though there were no teachers or headmaster, parents or siblings, police or judges, there was the Beast. There was also Peter, and there was the tall boy who had him by his left arm and the thick boy who had him by his right. There was also the boy with the great mulberry-coloured birthmark who slowly walked out of the rock hollow, wielding the sharpest spear Percy had ever seen. The marked boy climbed down the slope from Castle Rock, and onto the apron before him.

"What happens when you don't think?"

The marked boy grabbed Percy's hair and yanked it sharply down. Percy screamed and started to cry, continuing his habit of only considering his immediacy and ignoring how others felt. The pain of the gangrenous boy couldn't be matched by a single hair-tug, but Percy didn't know and had no reason to care.

"He's bleeding everywhere! And you killed him. Percy killed him dead!"

"Stanley, Stanley, Stanley!"

"Never hurt anybody, never, isn't that right?"

The crowd of boys sitting on the dirt nodded their heads, some even cheering from the excitement and anticipation, not knowing what was to happen next. A clamour broke out again from the anxious assembly, loud enough so that the marked boy spoke through a shout and a delighted, beaming grin.

"And did Percy break this rule, everyone?"

"Yes, he did!"

"Yeah!"

"Of course, oh!"

Philip and Timothy were just as excited as the rest, throwing Percy around by the wrists and whooping at everything the marked boy said, who moved his spear up and down and pointed it at Percy with vigor. The boy's desperate pants broke into violent screams through tears, snot and saliva running down his face.

"That's right, he did! Percy's dangerous! He killed a boy who didn't do nothing!"

"Boo!"

"He's a devil!"

"That's the dirtiest thing there is, isn't it? There's nothing the Beast hates more! Why, this little boy's no better than a Piggy!"

"He's an ugly Piggy!"

"Booh!"

"Oink oink!"

"Ha, a Piggy!"

"And Piggies don't bathe, they don't eat with their mouths shut, Piggies are animals. And what do you do with animals when you're hungry?"

"We kill 'em!"

"I'm hungry!"

"Kill the Piggy!"

"Let's go to the pool, everyone, and give this dirty, dirty Piggy a bath!"

Percy was pulled into the air and moved along the beach, his feet trailing in the sand behind him, the shouting, singing, dancing boys followed. Philip and Timothy bounced and shook Percy with each step while his bursts of limb-throttling became more frequent, more violent and more desperate. He cried and tilted his head to scream but any sound he made was drowned out by the marching throng behind them. The marked boy laughed and ran around Percy, jabbing him in the belly and back with the blunt end of his spear. From the crowd could be heard punctuated outbursts and incantations of words like 'Piggy' and 'Killer' chanted with force and meaning, unheard by Percy. As the march continued, a few boys came close enough to him to pull his hair or pinch his skin. Percy became more conscious of the greater situation. He had scratched a boy and that boy was going to die. He knew what that was, that was what had happened to Jack and Ralph and all the Piggies that were hunted. Percy even had a vague memory from years ago about a grandfather or uncle that he had loved very much, but stopped seeing one day.

And it was not an accident. Percy didn't expect it, but when he attacked the boy, his intention was to keep scratching until his fingertips connected with bone and brain matter. And if he wasn't being slowly ripped in two and cuffed by either wrist, he would've been glad to know he'd succeeded in making a boy suffer like a Piggy, especially content with the intensity and finality of the pain for which he was responsible. If Percy had been in the proper mind during his maneuver across the beach, he might have even felt relieved because even though he knew he was going to die, he had at least done the same unto another. Percy couldn't think straight because all the boys had formed a dense circle about him, scratching and punching and pulling his long, dirty hair. Then the marked boy threw out an especially loud shout and divided the circle away from Percy to reveal the pool behind him.

"Cleanse him!"

The hands released and Percy found himself thrown into coldness, dampness. The water of the surface slapped him in the face and soon filled his nose, mouth and ears. He shut his eyes tight. The wind rushed through his hair and the clouds passed by like cars on a parkway. His spirit was falling out of the sky onto a land of pure blackness in an unending ocean. But this land became sharp, pointed. Percy was heading to the mountaintop faster than a bullet and could see the skull in the helmet waiting for him there.

When Percy was yanked out of the water by a dozen hands he gasped and opened his eyes. The sounds came back and dragged him to his feet in front of Philip, Timothy and the marked boy, beaming at the shouting boys. Before he saw what was to become of himself, he saw the boy in the cave who had thrown sand in his eyes; Percy felt something. The water dribbled out of his ears and the marked boy's voice exploded into them.

"He's still a Piggy! He's still not clean!"

"He's a dirty Piggy!"

"Ha ha! Oink, oink!"

"Kill the Piggy!"

"I'm ..." Percy whispered.

But his words fell flat and were washed away like the tears from his face in the water. A familiar chant materialized and trampled the thoughts of Percy.

"Kill the Piggy! Cut its throat! Spill its blood!"

First came the spear, and then the rest of them struck. Percy fell backwards into the ocean where, as Peter had once said and the marked boy confirmed, the Beast lives. Percy was eaten by the Beast and the Beast became satisfied with the actions and the intentions of the boys. The tide came in and dragged the body out after a few pulls and which quickly disappeared beneath the rugged surface of the ocean. A breeze ruffled the leafless branches of the black trees by the beach, beneath which lay a pink hairy lump that had not been there before. The crowd of boys dancing their back to Castle Rock ignored Charlie's gift, as he had events on the waterfront. This Piggy watched Percy become slowly swallowed by the sea, following Jack and Ralph and the boat into the unknown. A dark speck appeared far away on the horizon, smoke surging from it into the sky. The Piggy watched the speck quickly disappear, back into the domain of the Father of the Flies, who swims in all of the waters, sits on his perch on the mountain and stalks Piggies all day in the darkness of the ravaged forest.

CHAPTER SIX: Beast from Land

Peter brought the boy out of the cave and passed the excited crowd on the beach as they traversed it. He and the boy with gangrenous pus extruding from his split skin hobbled along the trees on the black sand, unnoticed by the group of boys who were following a bloodied stick in the opposite direction beneath the sun. The scratched boy limped a few feet beside Peter, who knew very well about the dangers of contagion, especially in such a confining world. Peter was so kind as to walk slowly and speak in a friendly way to the infected youth, so that he was accompanied in pace and in spirit. The tall one became silent for a second and winced in trepidation. Then he risked a pat on the little one's seemingly sterile back to stem the alienation and the obvious agony the boy was feeling.

"You're a brave'un, very brave indeed, son. But the suffering you endured and still feel now's not for nothing, a big difference's been made."

"Thanks, Peter."

"No, thank you, son. And it's almost all over. I suspect that Percy's long done by now."

Down to the beach they trotted, either in small talk or in silence, all along the boy wincing from the pain of his open wounds, which seemed to have split wider. The stroll made its way down the curves that wound through the forest border beyond the pool. The trees that stood alone cast their black projections onto the dark mud with sooty colours reminiscent of the fire. They passed over the scar and could spot what remained of the ruined hull of a long-forgotten plane, not too distant, between uneven and somewhat concealing trees. Peter and the scratched one came upon steeper ground where the trees grew up and over on either side of them on a winding, shadier path. Along it could be seen long dead and decrepit ashes of wood that crumbled in another fire, one that came before the Great Fire. It only triumphed over a row of chosen trees, their wet coals now rotted in the compost.

The narrow path between trees was marked only by the occasional Piggy tracks and the felled boughs, as well as Charlie's persistent attempts in making the island his own. The trees grew sparse, the air indiscriminately thinner and the rocks became flattened out. Peter and the other one arrived at the top with the last of the day's sun winking over the ocean in which swam the Beast. The sun disappeared behind the world but its glow lingered over the dense and bumpy branches, the uneven shade cracked and vibrant, shaking and moving its way up into the top of the mountain where stood the two boys. Peter looked down at the scratched boy, and hesitated. He took a step away.

"Well, here we are. This is where you're gonna stay from now on."

"… For… waddya mean? Here? Why?"

"You're sick, you know. We can't all be getting sick 'cause there's no doctors, right?"

"Oh. How long will I stay here?"

"From now on. You get to sleep here and eat here, now." Peter explained.

The boy nodded uncertainly.

"Oh. Are you gonna stay with me?"

"I can't do that, I'll get sick. I'll come back tomorrow if you start feeling better," Peter lied.

"Will you bring food? What if I get hungry before that?"

"Don't worry, I'll bring food. If you want you can go out into the forest and catch a Piggy yourself."

"Oh, okay."

The boy with the scratched face sat down on a thick rock that stood behind him. He yawned and patted the boulder at its sides. Peter began retreating down the side.

"Like this, Peter? I'm just to sit here until tomorrow?"

"Just like that. Your worries are over."

"Goodbye, Peter."

"Bye-bye. And remember not to go anywhere. Anywhere at all, okay? Say hullo to Charlie for me if you see him."

"I understand, Peter."

"I'm sure you do. By the way, I'm sorry for having you thrown in the pool the other day like that. I bet the water burnt your cuts, didn't it?"

"Bye-bye. See you tomorrow."

Meanwhile, the Father of the Flies sat upon its perch. It sees what happens all over the island and in all of the oceans. It dictates its will over the land; the fall of rain, the ignition of flames in the forest. It sways the tides which feed on the edges of beaches like leeches on cattle. It watches the overripe trees in the black forest, the life and death of the animals which dwell within it. The Beast himself came out of the darkness of the land. Drawn to the helmet like a fly to rotten meat, he brought himself up the mountain during the darkness of the hour that follows sunset. He saw that the young boy, whose face secreted red pus, had woken up in a stupor, still half-asleep from his unfulfilling ten minutes of nervous sleep. A younger, shorter, skinnier boy stood tall before the scratched one, naked and spear-wielding. Beast, dog, fly, Charlie's spear was warm with blood.

Weak, tired, hungry, thirsty, scared and deathly ill. A creature like this is not usually Charlie's game. Things left out in the wild in such a depressed physical and mental state often find themselves killed by their own doing. And that was what was about to happen, Charlie told himself. It is one's own fault, and no one else's, if one decides to drop himself in the forest in the night with no weapon and no way home. This boy was alone and unarmed and fully aware that, at even the slightest sign of weakness or lapse in concentration, Charlie could and would get the drop on him, and he allowed himself to be there anyway. Charlie could suppose that was the difference between killing and murder. Perhaps with the hunt, it could be figured that not only did this pitiful animal let itself become killed, moreover, it desired it. Charlie had no need to justify his actions, so of course he didn't. He enjoyed what he did, and if he ever had to, he'd throw his arms up and swear he thought it was just a stupid little Piggy that didn't try to run away.

It is simply the way things are. Down came Charlie's spear through the back of the neck before a sound could come out. The tip penetrated the boy's throat but was quickly pulled out. Invisible in the night was the blood silently coughed up and poured onto the flat rock atop the mountain, painting it red. But Charlie saw. He knew the blood was there and where it was. He used his foot and rolled the boy with the scratched face onto his back, then onto his front again. After a few more downhill revolutions the body was on the edge of a cliff near the highest trees above the remains of the first fire. One tree which was not fully blackened and even had darkly burnt leaves remaining on its highest branches shaded by dark twigs scratched the boy's body. It couldn't be seen in the night, but like the blood on the stone it was there. Charlie shoved with one foot and the blunt of the spear.

The body spun into freefall, occasionally hitting the sides of the cliff and bouncing off of it, but the slope was not so subtle as to avoid hitting it before plunging into the dark void below. It twirled around, bounced up and down in intentional-like motions , well-practiced pirouettes. It looked to Charlie to be a skilled dancer or ice skater performing on a dangerous incline. The figure danced until it abruptly stopped and shot slightly forward with a softened blow as it settled into the compost heap from the first fire. The face was visible from atop the slim canyon, though only at a deeply contrived and forced angle, while most of it was buried under burnt debris infested with worms and beetles. Charlie took a single step back and the thing vanished. That meat could never compare to that of Piggies. And, of course, it wasn't really the meat which Charlie hunted.

He hiked back into the forest and grabbed a hold of the back hoof of a Piggy killed earlier in the day along the way. His pace neither halted nor slowed under the burden of the meat he dragged. This was his second trek of the day to Castle Rock. He walked fearlessly through the darkness, not scared anymore. But he was tired and the walk was long. The trees opened up and he appeared on the beach with the pool in sight, the bridge to the cave invisible past the curves of the island. He came upon his first Piggy which was still on the edge of the forest, where he had left it for the others earlier on. They must not have found it yet. He pulled the second Piggy up next to it, and they both lay on their bellies facing the ocean like a couple of old chums. For a second, they seemed alive to Charlie, like little boys watching hopefully into the blue with a longing he could not understand.

Charlie laughed at this picture. Around and through the trees which eclipsed his view of the cave was the faint but warm light of a glowing hearth. Charlie felt as if he understood the longing he saw in the dead Piggies. Of course, he didn't, nor could he explain to himself why or what it was exactly he meant. It must've been hunger, or the desire for sleep that he mistook for empathy. He went back into the forest, for it would be light out again before the third and final Piggy of that day would make it home with him.

A fire did indeed burn within the big cave, warm from the contented naked bodies. Before today, it had been a long time since they had gone hunting, and there had been such a powerful and lawful drive behind the hunt of Piggy. Peter sat by the mouth with a well-done piece of Piggy, congratulating each of the boys on their kill, though regretting that he could not have been there for he was dealing with the boy with the scratched face. Naturally, a few curious boys inquired what exactly he did with the doomed one. He simply told them that the final hours of the bleeding boy were sad and profound. The spirit within the cave remained festive despite this news.

During the night the boys became quieter and the fire dimmer. A realization began to settle into two boys once the novelty of the day's events was through. Clark and Dingo slept next to each other, almost touching, as Peter's laws had gradually become more lax, especially on that night. They looked into each other's eyes through the darkness and shared a hidden connection and understanding which was not really there. They nodded to one another. Though this did seem to communicate a single unified action, it could not transfer the inarticulate and invisible thoughts from the mind of one unique individual to another. The two of them turned their separate heads and faced upwards to the cold ceiling of rock that loomed above them.

"Are we wrong for what we did to-day?" thought Clark.

"I don't think that Percy should have been punished for doing what he wanted…" Dingo mused.

All along there was silence, no words spoken. A mutual disdain for Peter gesticulated through a wink and a nod, along with the dispatch and promise to put action behind their feelings. They smiled with great anticipation for the next morning, but the night passed dreadfully slowly. After several minutes of being tired and anxious and a few trips to relieve themselves outside they fell asleep and ended the longest night of the year.

The warmth of the new day came slowly into the hollow. It crept up the slope and around the bend into its mouth, bringing slight heat to the rocks at the entrance way. Timothy woke up first this morning. He pushed on Peter's shoulder until he was awake. Peter did the same to Philip and Timothy woke up the boy with the birthmark on his face, who picked up his spear and went to stand guard with it just outside the cave. Peter cupped his hands around his mouth.

"Get up, everyone, bathing time again!"

Peter, his three friends and the rest of the company came down to the pool by the beach, as tired as ever, yawning and moaning. All were reluctant to jump into the icy water as they'd stayed up especially late the night before. Some of them were hoping for an exception to the bathing rule for just the one morning. Clark and Dingo, however, pushed past the rest and plunged in. Peter briefly congratulated the two of them on their obedience and cleanliness as the others trudged in or got pushed into the water by Philip. Dingo thanked him enthusiastically and quickly ran off into the forest while Clark stayed behind to distract Peter. Before Peter and the marked boy could wash themselves and get back on guard duty at Castle Rock, Clark brought himself between the two and the pool.

"Hullo, Peter."

"Hi, Clark."

"Say, are the clothes almost ready?"

"They're almost done, yes, we just need needle and thread. Douglas says his mummy taught him how to sew and he can make them if we had some needle and thread or at least a sewing machine."

"What if we don't got needle or thread?"

"We'll get some soon."

"You can't go to the store, the store's too far away. Where are you gonna get needle and thread here?"

"It's simple, really. Since thread's made out of hair, don't you know, and we got lots of hair around here so all we have to do is cut some off and dunk it in the water to stick it together and then you entwine them."

"Oh, that's real nice, then… but what about the needle?"

"I can make one." The marked boy said. "I'll file down a Piggy bone."

"How?"

"I'm gonna rub it hard against a rock until it's small and sharp and tough."

"That's real smart. Can Douglas really make the clothes for all of us all by himself?"

"Yup."

"And it'll all be the right size?"

"His daddy was a tailor, he'll make the sizes good," Peter told him.

"What colour'll the clothes be?"

"Piggy colour."

"But I want black slacks."

"The Beast wants us to wear Piggy coloured clothes."

"That's what the Beast wants? For us to wear Piggy clothes?"

"Yup, Clark."

"Why?"

"'Cause if we don't it'll get angry."

"Why?"

"That's just the way things are."

"Why?"

"It's the way things are, Clark."

Clark stopped talking and looked down at his feet. He had expected to doubt everything that Peter told him but wasn't too sure anymore. Perhaps the way Peter says things are is not really how they are. There must somehow be a way in which all things that are necessary always align and conform, mustn't there? The idea that there were laws which were more universal those decreed on the burnt island was comforting but confusing. He didn't know if the rules of the Beast were the same as the way in which things should be. He didn't if the things Peter forced him to do, like bathing every morning, wearing Piggyskin clothes and chewing with one's mouth closed, conformed to the real demands the of Beast. When Clark looked up he saw that Peter had gone past him and into the pool with the marked boy and Timothy. Philip was standing at the side holding, the marked boy's spear, shivering and dripping from his nose, his long fair hair pressed down against his cold, round face. Suddenly, Clark heard Dingo's voice calling to him through the trees.

"Go! Go! Go! Now! Now! Now!"

While Philip was searching for the source of the voice, Clark made a swift move in his direction and yanked the spear out of Philip's grasp. Clark turned the stick so the blunt end faced forwards. He wielded it and cowed Philip backwards. He held it over his head swung it down to hit Phillip's ear and then connect with the collar bone. The thick blond boy crashed to the ground. Clark turned his attention to Timothy, who was in the pool but within reach. He swung the spear to his left and cracked the side of the stick onto Timothy's temple. Timothy cried out and pulled his hands to his head, giving the opportunity for Clark to kick a heap of black sand from the ground into his face. He yelled again and gripped at the sides of the pool to pull himself out but couldn't because his head hurt too badly. As Philip remained helpless on the ground where he fell, Clark ran around the pool to face the boy with the birthmark on his face, who tried to swim away. Clark jabbed the spear forward like a pool cue. It hit the boy in the neck but slipped off, scratching him. Clark lifted the stick and slammed it down on his head.

Around them, the rest of the boys crowded to watch in awe. They saw the biggest and the tallest of them crying from their injuries and clinging onto the ground for balance, as their leader sat among them in equal confusion. Clark felt anxious as he faced the group of boys until they saw Dingo coming from behind the trees, in a flawless proud stride. They soon caught a full glimpse of him and were awestruck.

Dingo's hair was impeccably cut, short like he used to wear it in school. It reminded each boy of a long ago life that they once knew, but not that they remembered knowing. Though they couldn't recall exactly the right words, the feeling of importance and civility that they might've found in a respected teacher or the well-groomed maturity of their fathers returned. As Dingo came from out of the trees with his lovely hair and pretty smile, all of those who saw him, even Peter and his friends, felt happy. They felt an intense feeling of longing, the sensation of almost, that had been brewing within them ever since they first came to the island. Their undetermined yearning was somewhat satisfied. They would've believed anything he said.

"What matters more than being free? What's more important than having fun? If we weren't here to have fun then why should we be here at all? I like swimming in the ocean, so I went in when no one was around and nothing happened to me! We've never had clothes but nothing ever happened to us! Am I right, everyone?"

All the boys nodded their heads, some even cheered a little. Clark, however, wasn't quite certain he agreed with what Dingo said about nothing mattering more than fun.

"Well, then someone has to be wrong! Someone told us to wear clothes and to only talk when we don't got food in our mouths, right?"

Once again the heads bobbed up and down in agreement like a wave. Even Philip and Timothy, who had begun to somewhat regain their composure, were nodding their heads a little with the others, in response to Dingo's words.

Dingo continued, "Peter's a liar! He makes up rules 'cause he likes bossing us around and doesn't want anyone else to have any fun. He doesn't even follow his own rules! He let those other three killed that boy right here for nothing, just 'cause he wanted to scare us. But I'm not scared of Peter or the other three, are any of you?"

At first they were quiet out of nervousness. The boys looked at their feet but then back into Dingo's eyes. He was as confident as ever and fearless. They looked over at each other and found themselves to be in agreement with each other. Light cheering broke out among nearly every boy there except for Peter and the boy with the mulberry-coloured birthmark.

"With me there'll be no stupid rules!" Dingo proclaimed. The cheering became louder and more and more festive. "You'll have fun with me, good fun! You can hunt, talk with your mouth full, throw sand around and whatever else you can think of!"

As the crowd became more excited, they started to spill out onto the beach, jumping and shouting, finally gathering around Dingo. Starting with Clark, the chant began to spread into uproariously until the word was being sung rhythmically and with devotion.

"Dingo, Dingo, Dingo!"

The singing and hopping went on and they were soon running and skipping about the pool like a tribal dance around a ceremonious bonfire. They held each other's hands in a circle and screamed their song of a lawless island to the sky. Peter and the marked boy tried to claw their way out of the pool but were trapped in by the vigorous celebration which encircled them. The party refused to collapse but only grew louder and faster around the pool with their feet kicking up black sand into a darkness inherent in the bright of day. It tumbled into the pool like waves of poison washing into Peter's eyes. The dark cloud of dust accumulated and rose through the air, covering only the inhabited part of the island with a shadow that eclipsed the day. Their voices clawed through the trees of the black forest like the unforgiving wind.

The sound and the smoke ripped open the dark curtain of the forest which revealed Charlie hauling himself out from it, towards the throng on the beach. The dance slowed and the singing silenced itself one voice at a time until the circle broke up and turned to face the trees. As the boys stood still the somber cloud which hung above their heads distilled into a layer of pure blackness that descended upon them all to coat their hair and faces in a thin, nearly invisible, coat of darkness which could easily be washed off. They felt embarrassed to have Charlie see them in the way he did, though they could not easily describe why.

He was dragging a Piggy with him by its back hoof, a spear in his other hand. Charlie let go to allow the carcass to settle in the ground next to its two brothers who had failed to be noticed since their arrivals. He stabbed his spear down into the Piggy's flank so that it would stay upright. Charlie pointed at the three Piggies sitting in a row as if to tell the boys around him that no thanks was needed, but in an arrogant way that showed evidence of bragging. Dingo came forward out from the crowd and approached Charlie in front of the forest. Dingo stopped a few feet from him and gave a small but friendly smile. It was returned with a complete lack of emotion, save perhaps for annoyance and repressed rage. Dingo knew well that Charlie was not one of them, since he often slept in the forest, and Dingo would be lucky to never have to talk to him again; but there were certain responsibilities.

"Charlie, you're not the Beast. There is no Beast. I'm in charge now, and I want you to keep hunting Piggies for us."

Charlie blinked once, perhaps twice. "Okay."

Charlie pulled his spear from the carcass and turned around. He slipped back into the forest from where he came. Shadows of the long, sharp branches enveloped him. His skin and the colours of the forest turned into a single entity, and then he vanished.

CHAPTER SEVEN: Dancing Shadows from out the Forest

The mountain eclipsed the rising sun, but only for an instant. The black of the night became dark navy with the dawn until shards of unendingly bright pinks and orange pierced it, slowly at first, over the ocean and onto the island, contrasting the dark brown trees they swam between. The spectrum ran over the horizon like florescent algae floating in a sea of nothingness. These colours and segments of light followed their course by way of the mountain's peak, jumping off its edge as if to their death and spreading across the land. The true sky showed itself and the navy of night faded into a pale blue which blurred its borders with the ocean all around.

The great eye woke up and glanced down. It blinked from the hill top and its light shone from there and ran down the side, from one end of the island over the treetops, into the water. Everything lit up, and the penumbrae flickered in the sands which lingered on the bottom of the pool its still surface twinkling in the sun's reflections. A red bird flashed out of the forest, caught in its rays. The bird sipped from the pool for an instant before going back home. The sun watched this and everything else within its domain. It saw an unblinking, sleepless animal roaming the forest, sneaking between the trees. Its long dark fur and filthy appearance made it indistinguishable the plants and animals and rocks. This thing dwelt there; it rested in the woods, ate and relieved itself there. The sun tried its best to cast its light and better see this creature, but the boughs blocked its way; the darkness was just too strong. Still, the sun climbed into the fullest of the morning sky. The last of its brightness exploded onto the colour enveloped land, settling into a paler reflection of the sea. Its brilliant ascent ended and the sun became the patient observer instead of the intervener.

The rock hollow opposite the mountain began to stir steadily awake. Peter, who was made to sleep at the back of the cave, woke up first and his movements budged Douglas, who was pressed up against him by the others. Douglas, who could sew were he given a great amount of thread and a couple needles, rolled to the side and woke up the boy next to him. Like dominoes they successively stirred the boy next to him out of his sleep. Finally Dingo sat up and looked to make sure that Peter was still with them. Dingo yawned and stood up.

"I'm going to go take a bath. Anyone wanna come?"

As if by obligation, they each stood themselves up and trotted after their new leader onto the beach. They happily marched behind Dingo over a few short creepers by the bridge at the bend where the forest met the water as they felt the soft, dry grains of sand between their toes. They went into the water and washed themselves, all except Dingo, who ventured out into the ocean water but only for a few seconds. The feeling of it made his flesh crawl, so once the novelty had been worn he came back to land, claiming that it was too salty to go swimming in there. He stood in front of the pool. The bathers stopped what they were doing in preparation for a speech, with an intent to listen they could never muster for Peter. Dingo folded his arms and smiled into the motionless crowd.

"Don't you all see? You can do anything! Playing, fighting… hunting, even! Remember hunting? You don't have to, that boy who sleeps in the woods will bring us Piggy anyway, but now we can if we want! So, waddya all say?"

They all cheered and clapped at his words, even Peter, who, it seemed, had all but resigned himself from his past ideals and decided it would be better to think the new way or to at least pretend to. Timothy and Philip clapped too, for they seemed to recall a group of at least five or six boys attacking them the other day in the pool and wouldn't want anger the crowd. They'd be much too proud to admit that even a single boy had humiliated them. The marked boy, on the other hand, remembered perfectly what Clark did the other day and bore a specific grudge against Clark. Clark knew that the marked boy had malicious intent.

A few boys drifted away from the pool, into the outer forest to play in the sand and pick the bulbs of unborn fruit off the tips of some brownish branches. Dingo had got himself overexcited at the idea of the hunt and left to gather long sticks from the woods to bring to the hollow, from which to make fresher, sharper spears.

Clark sat at the edge of the pool and delicately kicked his small, sun-tanned feet over the surface of the water, thinking about Dingo's you can do anything policy. That isn't exactly reasonable, because that would make what happened to Percy or Stanley or whatever his name might have been acceptable. And that wasn't quite right. Clark expected something more from the circumstances, something he was sure he used to know but now he could only almost feel an undescribed longing. He couldn't be alone in thinking this. Clark knew that surely some other boy had to be a little scared, even once in a while, of ending up like Percy, or having a boy come out of nowhere to bash your face in so you end up like that other boy who had been taken by the Beast. But, he recalled, there wasn't a Beast anymore.

The marked boy, formerly Peter's right-hand man, was facing the ocean, watching the tide come in, empty handed. His hands were folded across his back since he had been disarmed of his bloody spear by Dingo after the revolt. Philip and Timothy were treading water to keep their heads up while holding on to the side. They were talking about how difficult it was getting to pass waste and Timothy suggested it must be because they've only been eating meat without fruit. Clark scooted along the pool's edge to sit on its other side next to them. He whispered to the two boys and engaged them.

"Timothy, Philip? Remember Percy?"

"Uh huh."

"Yes."

"Well, do you think he deserved what he got?"

"Who cares? Dingo says we can do whatever we want!"

"Shuddup, Timothy! I'm not blaming you for anything, I'm just thinking that maybe we shouldn't have done what we did to Percy."

"But Clark, Percy killed the lil'un, and he got what he deserved."

"I know, but didn't you just say we can do whatever we want?"

"… I suppose."

"Yeah, boys, and that's why it was dumb to kill Percy, 'cause he was just doing what he wanted, right?"

"So you're saying Percy did nothing wrong?"

"Sure, according to Dingo, anyways. Is that what you two think?"

They nodded in unison. "Maybe we shouldn't have done that…"

"… even though Percy did kill that other boy. Peter said that killing's always wrong, so why was it okay to kill Percy? There's got to be some reason behind the rules. Is killing bad or not? Is it always bad?"

"I don't know, Clark."

"Exactly. That's what I'm trying to figure out, 'cause I don't Peter or Dingo know, either."

Clark stood up, still confused but confident he had left a lingering impression. In his head, Clark contrasted the craziness of Peter to that of Dingo. Digging through his memories, he tried to recall if there was order before either of them was in charge. He wandered off to the edge of the forest, past the boys playing in the sand, hot and bright yellow under the midday sun. He joined a group clinging to a tree and pulling off its buds.

Philip got out of the water. He noticed the marked boy who still stood looking out at the ocean. Philip walked along the side of the pool and sat beside Douglas and his pile of wet sand in the rough shape of an apartment building.

"Say, Douglas, I don't think we should've killed Percy."

"Why not? There's no Beast."

"Maybe, but we broke the only rule."

"There isn't any rules."

"Yes, there's one rule: do whatever you want. And we didn't let Percy do whatever he wanted, and we punished him for nothing."

"We can punish who we want. We can do anything."

"That's not the same thing, Douglas! We all ganged up on him, we all came up and decided we ought to do something we oughtn't to and Percy never even had a chance to say something, and besides, all he was doing was what he wanted, when he killed the boy that Peter took for a walk… right?"

"I guess so… but we weren't the ones who killed him."

"We didn't?"

"No, we just pushed him into the water. He stabbed him!" Douglas threw an accusatory finger behind Phillip.

It fell on the boy who stood facing the sea with thoughts no one else would ever know. He missed Peter's reign. He was committed and believed in his ideas. More than anything, he was disillusioned by Peter's sudden readiness to allow Dingo to undo all that had been done. The marked boy sighed and turned his head down to his feet to see only the smallest amounts of soot remaining in the soil beneath the tide. The beach had been washed by the moisture of sea breeze, the inevitable tide and several light rains, until it had regained its former vivacity. It had been cleaned rather quickly considering the intensity of the fire which had tainted it black in the first place.

He turned his head back to the beach, ignoring the finger pointed at him at looked further east beyond the pool. The scar in the sand used to seem enormous and terrifying to him but the rainfall had leveled it out to a great degree. Even the great metal body lying in it, whose aluminum hull had been melted and now looked like a decomposing skeleton lying in its own dried blood, was no longer a monstrous sight. Instead, it just confused him. The marked boy turned back to the sea and couldn't remember the last time he had walked over the scar or had been on the other side of it. Once in a while he caught himself forgetting what a plane is, his mind drawing blanks for only a few instants before he could recall his arrival to the island, though the memory was always foggy.

Hours passed until the sun cast no longer on the scar directly. The darkness was still weak enough to see faces. The marked boy continued to forget the nature of the plane because its current state confused him and eventually he found himself truly doubting whether that metal thing behind him was really what he thought it was. It seemed impossible to fly through the air, especially in a thing like that. He watched the waves until he was disturbed by a clamorous rumble of voices. He turned around and saw all of them. Every last one of them except Dingo, but he didn't notice that. Who the marked boy did notice in the front was Philip.

"You killed Percy!"

"What? We all killed Percy!"

"No we didn't. We were trying to stop you!"

"That's a silly thing to say. That's a lie, you know it! Besides, he deserved it, he was a senseless killer!"

"So are you! Why shouldn't we all just do to you what you did to Percy?"

"I'm no killer, Percy was a killer! He was dangerous and we needed him gone."

"We don't need no one gone but you."

"I did nothing wrong, I didn't even kill Percy! The Beast took him, and of course it did, it was angry with Percy because he broke the greatest law it gave us!"

"You broke the law too! Give us a reason why Percy shoulda been killed but you should not."

"Because there is a way that things have to be on the island! You know that, don't you?"

Philip thought for a second, but only a second. Was there a way? Was this the way? He liked the idea to kill those who kill, but he didn't like the Beast anymore. There was a new order on the island. There was Dingo's order, and Philip knew Dingo would be proud of him.

"That's not what Dingo says."

"Fine, then! You and Dingo will all end up in the belly of the Beast!"

But this couldn't frighten a single one of them, except for Peter, who of course held his tongue out of fear both of the boys and of the Beast. In the excitement, the marked boy didn't think to turn his head and look into Peter's eyes, maybe to get a reaction out from him, and a friend on his side. It would not have helped because Peter knows that nobody has a real friend, and that deep down everyone's a killer.

"Shuddup!" Philip yelled.

The marked boy continued, "I hope you all realize that none of you know what you're about to do."

The mob sprang across the beach and landed on him. There were no spears, only a flurry of fangs looking for throat to grab onto and claws looking for eyeballs to sink into. The horde pulsated on the edge of the water, throwing up its multiple limbs and pounding on its target deep below. The shrieking turned into a nearly imperceptible grunting, quickly stifled by teeth and nails as well as by the whooping and shouting. The yelling of the horde grew until it broke into pairs of boys dancing with locked arms and calling out. Philip held Timothy by the arm.

"I hope that bugger burns!" Philip called out.

"Burn? Waddya mean, 'burn'?"

"It's just a thing we say when we kill someone. It's to remind you of the Great Fire."

"Oh, okay then, Philip!"

They formed a circle around the pool. The dance was nearly in full swing when Dingo appeared from the western bend, spear in hand. He looked to the edge of the water and saw the body the second before the tide pulled it under. The dancers became still and shameful, staring at the one they respected most. Dingo held his arms outward in indignation and sheer disappointment.

"What the bloody hell is this? Piggies! Piggies, not people!"

There was silence within the circle until a voice, which very well may have been Peter's, spoke out.

"I thought you said we could do whatever we wanted."

This infuriated Dingo further. He jumped up and stomped on the ground, and yelled out at the black sky and into the dark forest. Dingo turned back into the crowd whose circular celebratory stance had deformed.

"Yes, but… still!"

"But it wasn't anyone important!"

"Yeah, just the purple-faced boy."

"Doesn't matter! It's just daft to kill a boy! You can't go around killing each other all the time, especially if you kill the ones that kill others, 'cause soon you'll have none of us left!"

"… You said we could do what we wanted…"

"Piggies! We hunt Piggies, because it's fun, right?"

There was no answer.

"You do all want to hunt Piggies, don't you?" Dingo was met with silence.

"Actually, I don't want to hunt Piggies," shouted someone.

"Me neither!"

"I don't want to go in the forest!"

"We're not allowed to hunt, I thought."

"Why do we have to hunt Piggies? That boy brings us meat!"

Dingo couldn't believe what he was hearing. Peter had ruined them, all of them, every last one of them. All the boys were useless, but the mostly they were afraid, and Dingo knew what scared people do. Boys who are afraid don't go out and hunt Piggies, not even in packs. They stay home where it's safe and hunt other boys, and only in packs. Except home isn't safe anymore, because everybody's hunting everybody and no one has a home. Dingo didn't realize until this point that all of his plans relied on trust and comradeship that couldn't exist. Peter's rules, the same that rendered them each and all useless and fearful, were the only commonalities that created this alliance. And Dingo knew that without alliance they were all animals. Perhaps they weren't Piggies, but they were certainly animals.

Dingo only spoke after a long pause, "But if we don't care about each other, if we can't be friendly, then it's just a matter of time before we're all gone. And besides, hunting Piggies is fun!"

"I think it's kind of scary."

"Hunting Piggies is bad."

"You're not allowed to touch a living Piggy!"

"But Charlie does it!" Dingo countered. "Charlie hunts Piggies, doesn't he?"

"I don't like Charlie!"

"But he's the Beast."

"Charlie sleeps in the woods!"

"Charlie could be watching us all right now."

This made them all quiet for a bit. Douglas started weeping, and no one consoled him because no one wanted to try. Each of them glanced into the forest a few times but no light penetrated the sparsely grown trees but they each swore to have seen one thing or another move in there. They all longed for Ohm, to be in a cave with a warm fire blazing and Piggy meat all around.

Finally, someone spoke up. "You said we could do what we want, I don't want to hunt Piggy."

Dingo growled. He turned to his right and ran into the woods holding his spear at the ready in front of him. He disappeared but his voice came out from between the trees.

"I'll show you! I'm gonna find Charlie and we're gonna have fun, good fun! And then you'll all wish you came with us instead of hunting each other, you lunatics!"

And then he was gone. In the silence, the boys felt a shiver and a terrible presence. An owl hooted and the sound of it sent them all slowly back up the beach to Castle Rock, looking around every which way for something to emerge from the forest and out at them. They were afraid to run but wanted nothing more than to be sound asleep and safe in the deepest cranny of their rock hollow with a shield of sleeping bodies. They all squeezed towards the back wall, but the few stuck on the outer layer fell asleep just as quickly.

CHAPTER EIGHT: Dogs, Piggies and Sheep

Deep in the heart of the dark forest, the depths were unbothered by the rising sun. Its first rays were still shaded behind the mountain and the easternmost trees, leaving the forest as black as if the Great Fire had only been extinguished the previous morning. The easy wind swayed the branches and the things which flew and crawled between them. The breeze brought the forest to life. The trees seemed to shiver from the cold of dawn or perhaps out of fear. The pattern the sun left on the prickly surface of the woods look like goose flesh on a frightened animal. The forest cringed at the sensation and at the thought of the vermin crawling through it.

In the forest, it was still dark and Charlie caught some poor animal's scent. It was fresh and crisp in his sinuses, cold, dry and lingering. Altogether it reminded Charlie of autumn and the piles of leaves his father used to rake up that he'd jump into with his neighbour friend, and how frustrated this would make his father. As he paused to reminisce, the smell grew faint; Charlie sprang into action, though a subtle but well-thought action it was. The forest was still too dark to run through, so he crouched down, pressed his open palms into the cold and black earth and arched his spine upwards like a cat. He crawled like this to feel his way safely over roots and pointed rocks and not to bump his head into a tree. Charlie somewhat picked up speed and pursued.

The beads of sweat trickled down Charlie's forehead and became entrapped in his tangles of hair but didn't he feel himself slowing down to match a tiring prey. The thing he chased was running from him, of course, and it was fearful, Charlie could sincerely feel this. What ran several yards in front of him was much nearer a foe than any ordinary prey. Sprinting on all fours Charlie beamed with delight to know what he hunted was no Piggy. No, this would be a field day for the Piggies, Charlie told himself, when they could all sit calmly and happily together to plan their nefarious plans in private. He opted to let them have the one day off and to let them just try to gang up on him. The Piggies deserved it but, after all, no one gets the drop on Charlie Conrad.

As time passed, his target seemed to show no sign of tiring and, even for a few instants of a second each, Charlie feared for his life, that this strange animal would turn itself around and come upon him. Then he righted his mind that this would never be and kept up his pace. The forest was still dim when Charlie was following the creature. They passed an open space where lay the still body of a Piggy he had taken a few hours ago. It watched him pursue and cackled with the laughter of a dozen men's voices. Charlie swore to himself to rip the poor bugger's head off as soon as he was done with the task at hand.

"Every time you eat one of us, there's a little more of us inside you."

Charlie yelled at the strange animal before him as it rustled branches and its running changed to a desperate flight. At this, Charlie became certain that he had already won. Now all to consider was the hours left in the day and for how long he could ignore the cackling of the Piggies. Their oinks and snorts and grunts surrounded him and chased him as he did to the animals of their origin. Charlie became enraged by the Piggies' cockiness because they inferred he'd gone soft, that he was too weak to hunt Piggies anymore. This made Charlie run faster towards the new animal as his hatred for the hairy pink creature he had previously killed shifted to the target he was following. It was screaming, and rather loudly, too, unlike the Piggies ever had. Such a blatant display of weakness and fear was alien to Charlie and yet, it did not slow him down by the slightest of margins. Its call became more piercing and indicative of a familiar phrase which probably begged for help or pleaded for mercy, but the blood flowed too swiftly through Charlie's ears for him to even make the effort of trying to understand the animal.

The morning became noon terribly slowly for Charlie as he began to feel himself getting worn out for the first time in a while. He might even have to sleep for more than an hour tonight. Finally, however, the thing running ahead of him began to slow slightly, but Charlie knew that the animal he chased would not subtly decelerate until it grinded to a deathly halt once it had depleted its energy. Charlie could tell because each turn it made, every breath it took and the way it ran were utterly desperate. Charlie expected that, in the next hour, though the sun had already made its way well past the boughs and lit the path before him, the animal would suddenly stop altogether and collapse. Charlie was low to the ground and watched between the trunks but could not yet see the animal though he could hear it panting.

At last, the two of them turned the corner near the base of the mountain and the sun revealed one to the other. A strange and terrible creature ran before Charlie. It was skinny and tall with wide eyes, which Charlie could see because every several seconds this animal would turn its head around to glance at its pursuer. The Piggies never did this, and this was smart of them because it would slow them down. Charlie saw it had great jaws with bloody fangs and pointed ears above them like some sort of dog, yet it also had uselessly thin black sticks of legs ending in cloven sheep hooves. A long pink tongue hung from its furry muzzle and it panted back at the sweaty and filthy creature of scratched up skin and tangled hair running at it on its hands and feet.

Charlie gathered that this pitiful animal must be a dog that became a sheep, or perhaps a sheep that became a dog. Regardless, it was now trapped in a hideous middle state which was of no use existing. And of course, all of his hatred was still present. Why was this monstrosity in Charlie's forest? Suddenly, it braked and fell to the earth. Charlie jumped on the poor creature and ended its grotesque being, for sheep belong on the beach and there's only room for one dog in the forest, and that one is Charlie. He pulled the sharp wooden stick out of the animal's hand and stabbed it through its the throat. Charlie left it protruding from the neck and turned away from the body, recalling that he didn't enjoy the taste of mutton.

With the full heat of the sun bearing on their nakedness, the boys treaded neck deep in the pool, in silence. Some looked over at each other but most stared down at their toes moving through the water, only inches away from those of the next boy. The sound of the steady tide on the shore and the calls of a couple birds prevailed over them, as well as the deep, numbing boredom which comes every day at noon near the beginning of summer. From this boredom, pain and, to a degree, fear, Clark looked up at the sky and gulped before getting out of the pool. He stood before the others with long, clean hair, naked and dripping. He crossed his arms and stomped his right foot twice.

"Alright, maybe Dingo was right, this one time, when he talked about us having to get along."

No one answered, nor paid him much attention.

"Is this how it is when no one cares about nobody?"

Two or three boys chuckled at this and looked at the others for sympathetic laughter. They could find none, but a few more of them turned their heads towards Clark when he spoke.

"What we need is new rules. Not silly rules, not stupid ones, and certainly we oughta have rules that don't change every time a new boy's in charge. What we all want is to be happy and everything, to have fun, don't we? Well, don't we?"

Peter shrugged and turned away.

"Well… we can't have too many rules, either. We all oughta come together and make some big decisions, choose for ourselves how we'll act towards each other, like hunting and killing. And no one can tell you how to bathe or how to eat, 'cause those are the kinds of rules we oughta give ourselves, each our own. There can't be one boy telling us how to act and think, we all oughta be in charge of ourselves, in a way. It isn't good or fun or nothing to always do what someone else tells you, I think. The thing is, we all have to want to tell ourselves what to do, do you understand?"

Some voices spoke up.

"What about the killing rules?"

"Are you saying we oughtn't to've killed that boy with the birthmark?"

"Well, yes, because we were stopping him from being in charge of himself. Even though he killed Percy, we oughtn't to've killed him. Then we're only as bad as he was, maybe even worse, I think. He tried to boss us around. He wanted to tell us what to do and he wanted to tell us how to think. And that's the dirtiest kind of person there is, if you ask me."

"You mean dirtier than Dingo, wherever he is?"

"Dingo's not dirty, he's pathetic. We oughtn't be mad at him, we should pity him. With no rules of any kind, the same as with too many rules, nobody knows what to do. If we act like him then we'll all end up spending the rest of our time on the island bored, hurt and afraid."

"But I like Dingo."

"Hey, I don't want any rules either!"

"I'm not saying there's gonna be rules! There's just gotta be… ideas, of some sort, which make us do stuff and keep us together, do you know? Rules don't mean anything unless we all want and believe in them. For example, why would you even want to kill someone?"

"I didn't want to kill anyone."

"But you killed the purple-faced boy!"

"Yeah! It was his idea to kill that boy in the first place." He pointed a dirty finger Clark's way.

Clark wondered why he even bothered speaking up when he could've just sat in the pool in undisturbed tedium for the rest of his life. He paused for a few seconds to let the boys calm down.

"I know, I did some bad things, and I'm really sorry for it. We shouldn't have killed him, I admit that but what really matters now if for-"

"We didn't kill him, you did!"

"Clark's the killer, not us!"

"That's a dirty lie and you know it! Remember what Dingo said. You can't just go around killing each other 'cause then you'll always be looking behind you, sleeping with one eye open in case the boys decide you're next! That's why we need rules, but special rules, ones that'll last forever and I've been thinking real hard but it's like none of you even care! I know you're all bored, and hurt, and scared, and that's why we do the bad things we do but every time there's a little less of us and we each get a little smaller. Then we're even worse."

"I'm not scared!"

"What was so dirty about the boy you killed anyway?"

"Who says we're scared or hurt?"

"No, no, no, you don't understand! What we oughta do is make ourselves better and stronger and smarter, make each other better, even if it's hard, but you can't get any better if you're hiding in the cave… or dead. Just look at Charlie! Sure, I know he's awful scary sometimes, but that's because we don't know him good enough. He's strong, he's a good hunter, he's not afraid of nothing and he works hard all day just to get food for us. We all oughta go into the forest once in a while, not like how Dingo did but to be like Charlie! Am I right?"

"There's snakes in the forest!"

"I'm not going anywhere near Charlie."

"Hunting is bad, and gross."

"Why should I listen to you? You're a killer!"

"If we oughtn't kill, then why can you?"

The pool was becoming hostile. Hands gripped to its sides, ready to hop out onto the beach at a moment's notice. When he saw tensed arms on the beach beginning to lift their bodies half way out of the water, preparing to jump, Clark started to sweat and his tongue got dry. Unable to speak, he took a few steps back. Clark turned on his heels and bolted up the beach, and the pool started shrieking and quickly emptied itself. The boys ran across the hot sand towards the blond figure making its way around the bends of the forest. Clark's lead diminished almost instantly because only one boy of the mob had to be faster than he to overtake him. Clark was less than a foot from the bridge when Timothy burst out of the crowd and jumped forward at him. Clark came crashing to the solid earth with the tall boy wrapped around his legs and the rest of them caught up.

When Timothy stood up, he, Philip, Peter and some other boy of considerable size took a hold of each of the limbs and lifted Clark's body in the air. For a few seconds the crowd hesitated, unsure of where to bring Clark, as they remembered his words and Dingo's about the incessant killing of others. Their collective mind woke up again and guided them across the stone bridge and up the slope of Castle Rock. Clark's body hung between the four boys and swayed and thrashed as others followed at his sides poking at him, laughing and yelling. The whole of it made its way into the big cave where the great collection of spears Dingo had assembled lay in a pile in the corner. Several boys picked them up and started jabbing the blunt ends into Clark's unguarded ribs and face. Peter let go of Clark's leg and ran past them to pick up Jack's old rusty knife.

When he felt his hair being pulled from behind, Clark started screaming. The other boys caught sight of what Peter was doing and their clamour steadied into an enthusiastic chanting of his name. Peter grabbed all of Clark's hair in a single handful and pulled back to stretch the pale white skin of his scalp. He crouched beneath the low ceiling of the rock hollow, which walls echoed what the boys shrieked. Quickly, Peter slashed the knife down at the whitest skin of Clark's head and ground it repeatedly against the hairline through the boy's deathly screams. Blood poured out immediately and out came the sound of tearing, Peter ripping the hair and the skin along with it from Clark's skull. Different shouts filled the cave as Peter did what he did not have a name for. The rusted knife bore further down and slowly the handful of hair disconnected from Clark's head as Peter peeled it off in his fist.

He pulled the bloody knife away when the reddened scalp clung to the skull by only thin strands of skin and stray arterioles. Peter tore it off and dropped the mass of wet crimson hair and intact flesh into the puddle of blood the process had left on the stone floor. The laughing and shouting continued, it even grew. The terrified shrieks resonating from Clark muffled themselves within him and only escaped as faint whispers. He swooned, and the boys dropped him to the cave floor, his exposed pinkness a foot from where his hair laid to rest. Peter went out to the pool to wash the knife and his hands, and everyone followed him. A boy or two hesitated for a second to kick the slow-breathing wretch on the floor in its gut.

CHAPTER NINE: Bad Meat and Seawater

The boys cooked up a Piggy they found left on the beach, presumably by Charlie, but no one could possibly know for certain. It might've been Dingo, even. It was cooked in the small rock hollow furthest down Castle Rock and its smell wafted back downhill onto the beach. Along its way, it flowed into the sleeping cave where odourless dried blood clung to its floor. Clark numbly wallowed in it with his regret and self-pity, becoming more exasperated with his current state and impending fate. The sweetness of the roasting meat just one cave over pulled him closer to full consciousness, but not quite, for Clark saw a full body silhouette of a Piggy suspended midair in the scent of its own roasting. His head hurt him terribly. The Piggy spoke to him mockingly.

"You're either a bored sheep or a lonely dog, don't you know?"

"I wanna be a Piggy."

"Of course you do, but we can't all be born Piggies."

"I suppose not."

"You supposed right, boy."

"I know I'll be useful someday, and they'll all wish they listened to me."

"Of course, you should live so long to see it. After all, the best gift of all is the one nobody ever asked for. Ha!"

The Piggy blurred into nothing and Clark sank out of lucidity. He touched an open hand to his head and quickly drew it back, awake enough to feel the hypersensitive stinging but not enough to see the redness of his fingers. Clark simply left his head alone and went to sleep without supper.

In the other cave, the roasting Piggy's bones were currently being tossed into the proper pile where it lay to rest with those of all the other Piggies before it. The heap was growing large enough to occupy a significant part of the hollow's space, but no boy thought yet of getting rid of them or of utilizing them in any way. The Piggy had been taken from a neat little row of them by the beach, growing much faster than they could eat them. They could last a good year with the meat left to them, if the greater part of it shouldn't go to waste feeding the flies. And some pigs further down the row where they had sat under the sun the longest had a putrid smell roiling in their stomachs, fuming out predominately through their nostrils, though a little came out from each pore. It accumulated and the stench of bad pork filled the air. The boys had known this scent too well and assumed it was the smell that was meant to emit from Piggy meat. But the flies must have known better for not a single one buzzed about the carcasses.

A figure materialized out of the shadows of the forest and hoisted a burden from its back onto the burgeoning string of foul corpses on the beach. For a second, the little boy thought himself quite accomplished, before turning his attention to the celebration on Castle Rock. Through the slips and crannies between the trees, he could see the boys dancing up. Charlie procured all their food for them like a servant, he was well aware, and all along he imagined they thought him a slave but he never let this idea bother him, because only sheep care what other sheep think. But they were becoming restless, and greedy. Charlie had grown to understand Piggies and was in awe of them. He hated them, but his respect for them was boundless, unlike the others. The boys wandered off to places they shouldn't be going, often alone. Next time they might all be marching through the forest together at midday with a spear in each hand. And Charlie knew what they did when en masse.

They disgusted him. The boys ate flesh like he did but they insisted on cooking it first. They needed Charlie to live but never appreciated it. They denied themselves the wholeness of the flavour in fresh killed meat, in which the blood still pumped swiftly, the heart thinking the chase still on. Charlie licked his lips imagining the day the spectacles they used to start fires shattered, or when the knife they use to cut the meat rusts into sand. How they would whine, some might even starve to death. Then Charlie became angry at himself for thinking of the boys for so long when there was a great and ever-growing island that belonged all to him. If only he could turn himself around, back to the forest, back to the hunt, but he couldn't stop picturing all the boys wandering through his forest while he wasn't looking.

It was all their fault, of course. They had no respect. They go out of their way to bite the hand that feeds them. What enraged Charlie most of all was their utter satisfaction with the lazy life they lead, how they felt no desire to get off the Piggy-scented beach and go hunting, fight a real, breathing Piggy to the end. It was a new kind of hatred which Charlie had never felt towards the boys before, because he had always assumed they were envious of him, so he never let the thought linger. Now he saw them walking the forest that wasn't theirs, just for the fun of it, knowing they could be killed, but like the Piggies, death doesn't deter them. He hated them because they didn't value life or death and because he found himself shamefully longing for the lazy life. Charlie began weeping and turned his head down to the line of mangled Piggies at his feet.

"Just what is there to for to them?"

"Never mind them, you silly little bugger," he heard one of them say. "You ought to turn right around and get back to the 'ole daily grind, my friend."

"Kill them," said another.

"Do what's right," said a third Piggy. "Smash the spectacles and throw the knife in the ocean, then run back into the forest. They'll thank you when they get the chance."

Terrified, Charlie bolted across the beach. They didn't care about him, they didn't care about each other. They were liars, fools who couldn't see anything beyond the tips of their noses, always ready to blurt out unsolicited advice. Charlie suspected he could've asked any question and received the same responses. Everything they say is a lie, their very being is a charade. He realized that even if the Piggies did rule the island, they were still just animals. Filthy, ignorant, dishonest and conniving, and the forest belonged to them. The smell of rotten Piggy became that of its burning flesh, as Charlie ran further around the beach, until the slope and the bridge appeared from behind the bend. The smell of Piggy was tenfold at Castle Rock compared to the raw ones that had been lying in the sun but he had to go up if anything was to be done.

He crossed the bridge and started sweating because he knew he would have to heed to one of the Piggies. Charlie chose the third to be the least awful. Do what's right, echoed in his head. He crossed the bridge and landed on his knees on the apron. When he got up and prepared to climb Charlie realized that he'd cut up the skin on his shins and it was nearly bleeding. Though he ignored it and climbed, he could feel the eyes of a dozen dead Piggies bearing into the back of his head. He stumbled up the slope where the air was dense and foggy with smoke that came from the far cave facing the sea, so most of the grey cloud it emitted fell away into the ocean and melted into its waves. Charlie sighed with relief because even though the fire was made in the big cave and the meat was cut there, the specs and the glasses were kept in the small one. He wouldn't have to walk upon the source of the smell, and he breathed heavily. The sweat ran down his body and became dusty when it met the smoke. The smoke infused into his hair, already dirty and drenched by fearful sweat, and stung his eyes and the inside of his nose.

Charlie screwed up his eyes and felt for the nearby hollow with arms extended. His open hand met the cold rock of the hollow's mouth and when Charlie turned into it, the smoke instantly cleared from his eyes. He stepped back from what he saw, mouth agape in horror. The boy with no scalp rose drunkenly to his feet, hunched over before Charlie, knees bending and extending grotesquely to keep himself upright. His eyes were vacant and half closed. He flashed Charlie a delirious smile.

"Look what the Piggy did to me!"

"Clark! What happened to your head?"

"Ha ha, what happened to yours?"

Charlie turned away and ran out into the smoke which blinded him. Like he was being chased, he ran forward as fast as he could across the plateau. He could not see but could only smell the roasting of Piggies he had long before killed. He bolted past the boulders littering the peak and in seconds was at the edge. Charlie jumped forward off the cliff with full momentum and strode through the air, out of the savoury fog. For an instant, Charlie turned his head back and saw all the boys sitting inside the hollow tearing at a chunk of meat with their greedy fangs, watching him fall. One stood up and yelled as Charlie hit the surface of the water. Charlie's head plunged and pulled in a breath of water through his nose; the smell of Piggy was gone forever. He became scared and started thrashing but the waves had already begun pulling at him. Dirt and soot fell from Charlie and dyed the water about him black. He was dragged, a torrent of kicking feet and scrambling arms, further from the shore. The water in his eyes and lungs, Charlie coughed while still under the surface, trying to right himself. With every movement and every inhalation, a new wave brushed over Charlie and into his mouth.

The moment of water and air bubbling together in his throat felt like hours. His head finally came up for longer than a second to let him cough and empty his stomach in front of him. Charlie kicked slowly and righted himself with his hands to stop the waves from coming over him each time. Only then did Charlie realize how bitterly cold he was. He started to shiver, his teeth rattling in his gums and the wind blowing roughly into his soaking-wet hair. The sound of his limbs splashing about for warmth was deafened by the slow and inevitable wave that lifted and lowered Charlie in cycles. He kept moving like this until his skin and muscles began to tingle all over, and eventually burn painfully. He stopped treading and the stinging lessened. The cold became more bearable because Charlie allowed himself to forget it.

His eyes adjusted to the dim moonlight. He looked around in all directions and saw nothing but a dot on the flatness of the ocean. If not for that, he wouldn't have known at all which direction he'd come from. He only hoped that the waves should not carry him back there. The speck on the horizon seemed to be getting bigger, so Charlie started frantically kicking to try to swim away. His legs quickly tired and seized up, and every other wave splashed down his throat. The dot he was pulled towards slowly gained shape. Charlie could imagine all the animals standing on the shore with their arms crossed, waiting for him. He ignored the cramp and kept pushing away, even as he could feel the gravity of the island dragging him back. Though the idea of drowning appealed more to Charlie than returning to the island, the feeling of water in his lungs and the slowly fading light terrified him. Charlie coughed up the seawater in his lungs. For the first time, though only out of a pure, instinctual will to life, he cried out.

Charlie became angry with himself, he wondered to where he could possibly have intended to swim and screamed louder. It was becoming darker and the cold was coming back to him. Charlie turned around and saw the long silhouette of the island growing on the ocean. For comfort, he told himself that if anyone ought to be afraid it was everyone else on the island. Charlie could fight each and every one of those animals, one at a time, even all at once. The weeping returned to Charlie as he primed himself to fight the impending island. It became dark brown and it seemed to rock in the water like it was floating. Water splashed in his eyes, but Charlie didn't need to see. Instead, he prepared to feel the ground come up beneath his feet, enabling him to run onto the beach. Lifted by each crest, he could feel the shape coming closer to him. Charlie extended his toes and clenched his fingers.

Something hard and buoyant splashed in front of him. Charlie grabbed at it immediately, and it let him keep his head above the water. He held onto to it for dear life, so tightly that when it began rising, Charlie was hoisted along with it. He was lifted into the air with the cold wind stabbing at him all over. Charlie started kicking around and shrieking at the top of his lungs, never letting go of the buoyant device in his arms when his shoulder and back bumped sharply against a hard, slanted surface behind him. He was swung back and hit against the metal again this time with his face. He opened his eyes, ocean water and tears falling from them, and ceased his screaming. He was being pulled up the side of a 40-foot sail boat by a rope. A wide-eyed blond man wearing short slacks and an oilskin hat grabbed Charlie and lifted him aboard. Another dressed similarly, with a grey moustache and beard, slackened his grip around the other end of the rope. Charlie let go of the floatation device and looked up at the men. The old Australian sailor took the naked boy's hand and pulled him to his feet, speaking to him in a shocked tone.

"Oi, mate, what are you doing out here in the back o' beyond?"

Charlie said nothing but looked about the boat.

"Do you speak English? No? Francheh, Doytsh, Espanyol? Raised by wolves, or something then? Like that boy they found in Aveyron a hundred years ago, I'll bet. Well?"

He started crying again and held onto the old man's leg with his whole body. The younger sailor got to his knees and patted Charlie's shoulder with one hand . He stood back up and shifted his gaze to the sea. The old man faced him and they briefly spoke to each other, using strange expressions Charlie could not understand with uneasy hand gestures indicating their concern. At last, the old man shrugged and scrutinized the little boy he had pulled out of the ocean.

"Listen, we're only a couple hours from our destination in Tahiti, and we're already running awfully late… that's the closest port from here but I'm sure there's 'nough fuel to take you back to Aus, if that's where you belong. Well?"

The boy remained silent. The other sailor folded his arms and shook his head. "Maybe he hasn't learned to talk yet, Pa."

"Nonsense, he's at least six years old. Just shy, is all. Poor lil' bugger, can only imagine how scared he must be. I'd hope the police can find his family, if they're still alive."

"Hmm. Hold on, Pa. Lil' boy, you got a name? You know where you're from? Just tell me something, you know that I care about what happens to you. Are you a Kiwi, a Pom, or a Yank, maybe? Just tell me where it is you'd like to go and everything'll be alright."

Whatever his thoughts were, Charlie couldn't articulate them. Instead he simply lifted his hand and pointed a finger east. But it was still far off and all that could be seen from there was the empty sea flashing the bright colours it reflected from the rising sun so close above it.