Fear Is the Rider by Kenneth Cook

in silence in the dim chamber.
    ‘You think he’ll take the Honda?’ asked Katie after a while.
    ‘Either that, or destroy it. If he can find it. We couldn’t, remember?’
    ‘Then, if we just wait here…we’re all right?’
    ‘I think so. We just wait until the police come looking for us. It’ll only be a day or two. It’s cool here. We can last without water, if he takes the Honda. Except…’
    ‘Except?’
    Shaw didn’t want to say it, but Katie was there too, with him. They had to face all the possibilities.
    ‘Except that it’ll be dark soon.’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘It’ll be dead black down here.’
    ‘You think…’
    ‘Well,’ Shaw spoke diffidently. ‘If he came down one of the shafts in the dark…we wouldn’t be able to see him.’
    ‘But he wouldn’t be able to see us.’
    ‘No. But…well, it probably won’t come to that.’ What Shaw didn’t want to say was that a maniac with an axe, determined to kill, feeling his way through the darkness, groping blindly through the tunnels, would eventually blunder into them. A swinging axe would be much more destructive than a shotgun when neither man could see.
    ‘But we’d hear him anyway,’ said Katie; then, plaintively, ‘wouldn’t we?’
    ‘The whole thing doesn’t make sense,’ said Shaw with a rising sense of absurd irritation. ‘What’s he filling in that hole for if he intends to come down?’ but he knew the answer. If only a few holes were filled in and the Man came down, the chances were he’d drive his quarry into a blocked tunnel. Like a ferret hunting rabbits in a partially stopped burrow.
    He thought of the night in black darkness, continually waiting for the sound that meant that the Man was there in striking distance. And then the days. How long would the police take to come?
    The sounds of falling earth had stopped some moments before. They waited silently for what might happen next. The light was growing dimmer.
    The sound started again, a rush and a thump, a rush and a thump, steady and rhythmic, strangely and terrifyingly casual.
    But it was coming from a different direction.
    ‘He’s filling in another hole,’ said Katie.
    Shaw said nothing.
    ‘Why is he filling in another hole?’ Katie’s voice was high-pitched. ‘Why is he doing it? He must know he can’t fill them all.’
    He was doing it because if he stopped up a few exits his chance of catching his prey below ground would be that much greater. Shaw knew it, but he wasn’t going to say it.
    He looked at the ladder leading up the shaft from the chamber they were in. It wasn’t more than ten metres high. He could get up it in seconds. As far as he could make out the sounds of a shaft being filled were coming from the left. It couldn’t be far away, thirty, fifty metres at the most. If he could get up the shaft, the Man would be intent on his work.
    ‘I’m going to take a shot at him,’ Shaw said suddenly.
    Katie stared at him.
    ‘He’ll be working at the top of a shaft just over there to the left. The storm’s still going’—he gestured at the whirling, dimming pool of light at the top of the shaft—‘he won’t see me. I’ll get a clear shot at him with any luck.’
    ‘But why not stay here? He won’t touch us down here.’ She didn’t believe that any more than he did.
    ‘I’m going up,’ he repeated. ‘It’ll only take a few seconds. I can get down again. He can’t do anything to me. And I might get him.’
    Katie said nothing. In this sudden, desperate, impossible world ordinary communication was suspended. They understood each other in some manner independent of words.
    Shaw knelt and stripped off his shoes and socks. There was less chance of slipping that way.
    He hung the gun over his shoulder with the strap at his back so that he could raise it and fire it quickly if the Man appeared at the top of the shaft before he got there. Reluctantly he cocked both hammers. If that shape appeared at the head of the shaft he’d need to fire