Fear Is the Rider (18 page)

When he reached the edge of the crest the smoke and dust from the scrub formed a fog through which he could hardly see but there below him twenty metres away was Katie screaming, beating feebly at the sand. Twenty metres to her left in the shroud of dust and smoke and ash the Man, huge, menacing and black, a silhouette of doom, axe in hand, was wading through the shifting sand towards her.

Shaw screamed in exultation and hate and leaped to the very crest of the great wave of sand and began a manic dance. The crest broke and tons of sand rolled down the dune like the foam of a breaking wave. Shaw went with it, standing as long as he could then falling prone and riding the wave of sand as though it was water, plunging down towards the obscure and dangerous shape of the Man labouring through the sand.

The Man stopped as he saw what was happening and turned to face Shaw, axe raised.

The moving sand buried the Man to the neck in an instant and Shaw was on top of him, clawing at the long rank hair, smashing at the head, now only a shape in the swirl of dust. The Man had his hands above the sand. He grabbed Shaw by the ankle with his left hand and flailed with the axe in his right hand. Shaw writhed from side to side, thrusting his body away from the deadly blade and thrashing at the Man's head and arms with the jack handle.

The grip on his leg was unbreakable and soon the axe would strike home. Sand was the weapon. Shaw dropped the jack handle and scrabbled at the sand around him. Another small wave fell and the Man's face was covered, only the hair showing above the sand. Still the hand held Shaw's leg and the axe kept striking blindly into the sand on either side of his body.

But now the hand holding Shaw's ankle and the hand holding the axe were all that Shaw could see of the Man. He pushed down more sand. The grip on his ankle relaxed. More sand and the hairy left hand disappeared. The right hand which held the axe was still moving as the life below worked out its agony.

That moving axe, Shaw knew, meant a living man below the hot sand. He felt nothing except astonished relief.

He was sitting on the sand staring at the axe, breathing heavily, so shocked that for moments he forgot where he was, forgot the sun beating down on the back of his head, forgot the choking cloud of dust and smoke, forgot Katie.

Katie!

He turned away from the fascination of the axe and eased himself down the slope to the right, towards Katie, careful not to bring an avalanche down after him.

She was staring at him with an expression of bewildered fear. He took her hand and drew her gently from the sand.

‘Take it slowly,' he said. ‘Take it slowly and gently, don't make it move. We can get out of here.'

Hand in hand, they carefully moved sideways along the dune towards the line of scrub. They had to pass the axe and the hand. They stopped and looked. There was just the faintest suggestion of movement in the hand and the sand seem to be pulsating.

Shaw said tentatively, ‘Do you think…'

Katie, her teeth bared in a curiously animal grimace, said, ‘I'll do it.' She knelt and scooped sand over the hand until it disappeared and there was only the axe to be seen.

Katie and Shaw stood where they were for five minutes, not speaking, not moving, not thinking and then Katie said, ‘Now he's got to be dead.'

Shaw reached down and grabbed the head of the axe. He tried to pull it out of the sand but it wouldn't move. The dead hand below was holding it in a grip Shaw could not break. He tried again. He had an irrational reluctance to leave the axe with the Man. He wanted him to be not only dead but weaponless. But he could not pull the axe free.

‘Leave it,' said Katie, ‘he's dead.'

They made their way cautiously down the dune and Shaw paused for a moment by the goat still trapped in the sand, uncomplainingly awaiting its death by the sun. He hauled the animal slowly out by the horns and as soon as it was free it shook itself clear of him, slid down the dune and bounded into the blackened scrub.

‘I had to do that,' said Shaw, half apologetically. ‘It was him that saved us really.'

They walked together through the ruins of the bush, heading towards the track.

Now the fire had cleared the scrub, the going was easier and Shaw found the warm ashes less harsh on his ruined feet than the bare ground.

The fire area stretched three or four kilometres from the dunes and then ended abruptly and there parked in a clearing was the Land Cruiser. Then it was simply a matter of driving back to Yogabilla.

The police found the bodies of the Aborigine and the old couple and they found the wreckage of the Honda and they saw the devastation of the fire. But they never found the body of the Man.

Katie and Shaw had no exact idea of where they had gone into the dunes, the wind had eliminated all tracks, and there was no sign of the axe which was the only marker. It had certainly been covered by another fall of sand, said the police sergeant; but they never found the body of the Man.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Man has always had his demons. The closer these demons resemble man himself, the more terrifying they are.

The idea of a Feral or Wild Man has pervaded mankind's mythology from earliest times. Nebuchadnezzar ‘was driven from among men…and his body was wet with the dew of Heaven…and his nails were like birds' claws' (Daniel IV.33).

The Choromandae, according to Pliny the Elder, were ‘a savage and wild people…speech have they none… rough they are and hairy all over their bodies, eyes they have, red like the owlets, and toothed they be like dogs.'

The Christian notion of the Devil is based in part on the goat-legged Greek god Pan, the drumming of whose cloven hooves in the forests spread
panic
among those who heard it. Pan, along with Priapus, Silenus and Bacchus, has long been associated with orgiastic release and abandonment. The virility of these gods has somehow been passed on as one of the attributes of the Wild Man. Traditionally the Feral Man is strong, hirsute and libidinous.

European cultures abound with stories of Wild Men—outcasts almost invariably carrying clubs. These men were seen as anything from symbols of the darker side of human nature to the very essence of the devil himself.

Traditionally, the Feral Man has had a single prey—man.

Every year in Australia, according to police records, more than three hundred people are reported missing and are never heard of again.