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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76644 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+                          Clicking Red Heels
+
+                             By PAUL ERNST
+
+                _Nobody knew that Gruin had killed his
+              sweetheart, but her little red heels tapped
+              a march of death wherever he went, driving
+                     him to a desperate resolve._
+
+           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
+                        Weird Tales June 1937.
+         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
+         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
+
+
+There are two kinds of fear. There is fear of the known--terror of
+death or disease or accident, or of social consequences of wrong
+actions. This is bad enough, but it is a little thing compared to fear
+of the unknown. _That_ is the horror that freezes your brain and stops
+your breath in your throat; _that_ is the terror that wrings sweat
+in icy drops from your clammy skin. Somewhere near you a black force
+lurks, some shadow from a hell incomprehensible to mortal mind, some
+_thing_ from another world which looms over you and threatens you with
+a menace all the more awful for being unguessable. It is then that you
+go mad and babble in your frightful torment of danger--and cannot even
+say what that danger is....
+
+Eldon Gruin was in the grip of the first fear. He was to know the
+second, too; but at the time he knew only the first, and thought that
+bad enough. His fear was of the consequences of a wrong act, and it was
+embodied in a girl.
+
+The name of Gruin's fear was Maria José, whose father cut and stitched
+leather in the repair of shoes in a dingy basement shop on Eighth
+Avenue in New York. Her father was a gargoyle of a man, alone in the
+world save for his Maria. But Maria--ah, she was a throw-back to some
+Castilian ancestress who supplied inspiration for the fiery men who
+made Spain unconquerable.
+
+Maria had great black eyes with ridiculously long lashes, and a
+perfect, dainty oval of a face, and red, red lips, and a body that
+sculptors in old Greece would have loved, and tiny feet on which--as
+a sort of symbol of her mercurial temperament and gayety--were always
+red-heeled shoes. They danced, those red-heeled small shoes, in a sort
+of gay, mad rhythm of their own as Maria clicked down the street in
+them. They had danced into hearts and out again, with an unsatisfying
+trill of laughter before they carried their shapely, tempestuous young
+owner into Gruin's life.
+
+It was all inconsequential, a thing no sane person should have built
+hopes on, Gruin often reflected irritably.
+
+He was thirty-one, fairly wealthy, single, and out for fun. He had
+met her at a night club where--till the fat proprietor had tried to
+mix intimacy with managership--Maria had danced for a little while
+professionally, in twinkling white satin pumps with red heels.
+
+Gruin had made her a few promises, perhaps. A man does when he is
+captivated. And Maria had begun to cling. At first it had been
+exhilarating. Men looked after her when she clicked up the sidewalk on
+those ridiculous, pathetic, appropriate little red heels to meet him.
+Gruin, who was not bad-looking, knew that he and Maria made a striking
+pair together.
+
+Nice to have a girl like that live only for your whims. Intoxicating
+to have such beauty almost abjectly at your command. Exhilarating to
+the ego to know that you can turn on such a love-stream. Natural to
+forget that it might be difficult to turn that love-stream off again.
+
+It wasn't long before Gruin had found that he was driving a force that
+could not be controlled much longer. And then it was annoying. No, more
+than that--it was rather terrifying!
+
+So he sat in the Lance Club lounge the afternoon of the evening which
+was to be the turning-point in his not very useful young life, and
+condemned Maria José.
+
+Any girl with any sense would have known that the affair must be
+transient. She was a garlic-eating cobbler's daughter. He was heir to
+a modest fortune and owned an old name. Had she seriously thought he
+meant to--marry her? She couldn't have! Yet she was certainly acting
+like it now.
+
+Gruin shifted in the leather club chair and sipped some of his
+cocktail. And he felt faint perspiration steal out on the palms of his
+hands as he reviewed Maria's recent conduct.
+
+When she clicked up on her red heels to meet him now, it was more often
+than not to burst into tears because she hadn't seen him last night
+or the night before--she demanded all of his time. When he talked of
+taking a trip, she stared deep into his eyes, tearful no longer, and
+advised him not to. There had been a newspaper rumor of his engagement
+to a debutante in New York, and----
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gruin sipped his cocktail again. Rather, he gulped it for strength. He
+had at first thought it cute and picturesque of Maria that she carried
+a little knife in her garter just above her beautiful right knee. He
+didn't think it was at all cute now. So Gruin sat in the lounge of the
+sleek, quiet club and knew what had to be done.
+
+He had started something with Maria that would never die while she
+lived. If he tried to slide out of her life, she would raise a scandal
+that would ruin him with his righteous grandfather, from whom all
+monetary blessings flowed. If he tried to leave town, she would follow.
+If he tried to get it over quickly and finally by marrying some girl of
+his own class----
+
+The knife at her knee was small, but it was slim and sharp, and it had
+been flashed more than once before his white face.
+
+Living, Maria, the cobbler's daughter, was a constant menace to Eldon
+Gruin. So Maria must die.
+
+Gruin shivered a little in the big leather chair in the luxurious
+lounge. Murder is a large order, even when you're as sure you can get
+away with it as Gruin was. In addition, there was a dim realization
+in the back of his mind that the Josés, father and daughter, were
+not quite as other people were. There was something a little--well,
+mystic--in their vital black eyes.
+
+The one time when Gruin had consented indifferently to meet Maria's
+father they had come upon him in the back room of his solitary
+sweatshop, talking. Talking--with no one else in the room. Talking to
+her mother, his dead wife, Maria had explained seriously, afterward.
+And in the man's deep-set eyes had been a flame that killed laughter on
+Gruin's lips. Something in the spirit and soul of the Josés, father and
+daughter, that set them a little apart from others--something mystic
+and unknown....
+
+"Hell," said Gruin, finishing his cocktail and grimacing contemptuously
+at himself.
+
+He was a fool. He was imagining things. Maria was just a girl--a woman
+whose ardent infatuation had grown to the point where it threatened a
+fortune he was to inherit, and his whole future life and good name. He
+could imagine his grandfather's disinheritance speech if he presented
+the mercurial cobbler's daughter in the gaudy red heels as his wife!
+
+"It's my life or hers," Gruin told himself, to stifle the gray fear of
+murder--even so easy and fool-proof a murder as he had in mind.
+
+And with the gray fear lulled by what he chose to call the inevitable,
+he had dinner at the club and then went to meet Maria....
+
+He met her at Eighth Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street at a little
+after half-past eight. She clicked over the sidewalk in her red heels
+to the curb, glowing and beautiful in a squirrel coat which he had
+indiscreetly called an "engagement" present when he offered it--because
+otherwise she would not have accepted it.
+
+"Eldon! My darling! You are late. I have waited and waited."
+
+"I said, eight-thirty," Gruin mumbled.
+
+"I did not want to wait that long. I could not. I have been here since
+before eight.... Sweetheart, you haven't said you love me...."
+
+Gruin opened the door of his roadster and she got in.
+
+"Eldon, this waiting and waiting--I cannot understand it. When are we
+going to--to stand before Father Mollé, so I will be with you always?"
+
+"Very soon," Gruin said, sliding into gear. "You will not have to wait
+for me ever again."
+
+Up Riverside Drive they went, across the Hudson and up the Palisades,
+to a place where they had parked often at night during the spring and
+summer and fall--a place that had given Gruin courage to do murder by
+simplifying it.
+
+There was a spot where you drove off the crowded highway, down half a
+block of unfinished dirt road with a low wooden rail at the end. The
+rail barred the street-end from a hundred-foot drop down the cliffside
+to piles of crushed rock that were to be a new dock soon. And the rail
+was very flimsy and a little rotten. And there was a great tree that
+grew at the cliff's edge and flung one branch straight over the road so
+low that a car's top almost scraped it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Another car was parked in the road-end when Gruin got there with Maria,
+in spite of the December cold. Gruin had to wait for this car to leave.
+He put his arm around Maria, meanwhile gazing upward to be sure that he
+had stopped the roadster directly under the low branch of the big tree.
+
+"It is cold," said Maria, shivering in spite of her fur. "Would we not
+be warmer with the top up?"
+
+"The air tastes good," said Gruin hastily. It would ruin his plan if
+the roadster's top were put up. He had to have a clear space above him.
+
+The other car left. He and Maria were alone in the open roadster under
+the December stars.
+
+"Are you sick?" said Maria, gazing at him in the dashlight.
+
+"No, no. Not at all," said Gruin, whose teeth showed a tendency to
+chatter.
+
+Maria looked deep into his eyes. Something mystic and inexorable in her
+black ones....
+
+"Eldon, you are acting very strangely. It is not that you are thinking
+of breaking your promise?"
+
+"Of course not," Gruin said hastily.
+
+Maria's eyes still searched his, aflame with infatuation, and with
+tempestuous resolve. The light from the roadster's dash showed on
+little red heels, on a length of silk stocking that even now could make
+Gruin's pulses jerk a trifle, on soft white flesh with a twisted garter
+under it--on a slim little dagger! Then slowly her skirt went down
+again.
+
+"I think we'd better leave," Gruin said, a trifle thickly. God! this
+was the kind of thing you read about in the funny papers. You didn't
+dream, at first, that it would force you to murder....
+
+"We'll go," he said hoarsely.
+
+He started the car, and shifted to first gear with the clutch pressed
+down. He raced the motor, pulling out the hand throttle on the dash so
+that the engine speed would maintain itself.
+
+"Why are you making the engine go so fast?" said Maria.
+
+"The motor's cold--have to warm it up...."
+
+With the words, Gruin stood up suddenly, as nearly erect as the wheel
+would let him. His fingers hooked over the overhanging tree branch--and
+his foot left the clutch.
+
+[Illustration: "His fingers hooked over the branch and his foot left
+the clutch."]
+
+The scream of tires spinning from sudden power of a roaring,
+full-throttled motor mingled with Maria José's shriek. The roadster
+leaped toward the wooden rail at the edge of the cliff, with Gruin
+hanging over the road behind.
+
+Maria's fingers tore at his legs as she sought to clutch him, and his
+left heel ground into her face, forcing her back in the seat. The
+roadster smashed through the wooden rail, teetered for just an instant
+on the edge of the cliff, then plunged forward.
+
+The noise of nearly two tons of metal smashing on rock a hundred feet
+below, shocked the night. And Gruin dropped into the road and ran to
+the edge. He looked down.
+
+Flame was rising from the wreck far below. He saw a black cascade in
+the path of the flame. Maria's hair. He was whimpering a little as he
+moved, without being conscious of it. There was a ledge ten feet down,
+with a thick bush growing from it. He lowered himself to that, clung to
+it, and began shouting for help....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It all went as he had thought it would. The papers got just the right
+angle.
+
+A Gruin, scion of one of the city's best-known, if not richest,
+families, had been out with some girl named Maria José. He had parked
+at the edge of the Palisades. Probably there'd been a little drinking.
+When leaving, he had carelessly shifted the gear lever forward into
+second instead of forward into reverse. The car had plunged over the
+cliff carrying both of them, but he had been thrown out and had caught
+a bush which saved his life. The girl had gone on down--to death.
+
+There was unfavorable publicity; there were infuriated lectures
+from his grandfather; there was talk of prosecution for criminal
+carelessness.
+
+And that was all. With one clever stroke Gruin had gotten rid of
+a danger that had grown to intolerable proportions in his life.
+Decorously he went to the funeral in which a girl's shattered body was
+lowered into the ground. And afterward, Maria's father came up to him.
+
+Gruin looked hastily around. There was no one near, and he was a little
+afraid of the somber fire in the man's deep-set black eyes. He had aged
+twenty years. He looked like a gargoyle with an iron-gray beard and
+white hair.
+
+"You killed Maria," he said, with the words coming slowly and painfully.
+
+"I know." Gruin's face took on a contrite and sympathetic expression.
+"A terrible accident----"
+
+"That is not what I mean," said Maria's father. "It was not accident.
+_I know._ You killed my girl on purpose. _You murdered her!_"
+
+"No, no! I swear----"
+
+Gruin stopped at the look in his eyes. And José went on, slowly,
+painfully, with every word ringing in Gruin's brain.
+
+"I bring her curse on your head. You killed her to be free from her.
+But you shall not be free. She will be with you always, beside you,
+walking when you walk, stopping when you stop. Always, always beside
+you...."
+
+Gruin got away from there, and also, he was sure, away from all that
+had threatened him.
+
+There were, when all the smoke had cleared away, no consequences at
+all. The charges of criminal carelessness never materialized. His
+grandfather, unconcerned with death, finally forgave him for wasting a
+few evenings with a cheap unknown named Maria. The world didn't dream
+that the tragedy at the cliff was not an accident. He had murdered
+successfully....
+
+And then he strolled from his grandfather's house one evening, bent for
+an engagement with a girl almost as beautiful as Maria had been and
+much more sensible, and a queer thing happened.
+
+As he walked across the curb from door to car--a big new coupé to
+take the place of the roadster--he heard someone walking beside him.
+At least he thought for a moment that he had heard steps matching his
+own. But he saw an instant later that he had been wrong, because when
+he turned around, there was no one on the sidewalk. No one within half
+a block of him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He got into the coupé and drove to the apartment of the girl he had the
+engagement with. Again, as he walked from curb to building door, he
+heard steps sound out beside him--possibly a little behind him, that
+matched his steps. But he scarcely thought twice about it, because
+there were half a dozen people around him here, and any one of them
+could have made the sound.
+
+He had one vague and irrelevant memory as he opened the vestibule door.
+It was a memory of Maria and him walking down the street. Striving to
+match his moods, Maria also, laughingly, strove to match his strides.
+She tried to keep her small red heels clicking on the walk in time with
+his steps. He had often teased her about it, taking longer and slower
+strides that taxed her smallness more and more till finally she simply
+could not keep step with him and would break rhythm with a gay laugh.
+
+Maria and he, walking down the street, with her absurd red heels
+clicking in time with his step....
+
+He thrust the picture aside and went up deep-carpeted halls and
+stairways to the apartment of the blond with the slightly hard blue
+eyes with whom he had a date. And they went to a Broadway club and
+danced.
+
+During the evening, Gruin cursed his memory for bringing back the
+picture of himself and Maria walking, with her red heels tapping the
+time of his steps. Because, after that recollection, his imagination
+really began to play tricks on him.
+
+He began to hear heels clicking with each of his steps as he moved. Not
+just now and then, but all the time.
+
+When he stood up from the table as the orchestra started, and walked
+around to help the blond with her chair, he heard a precise little
+heel-click with each stride he took. The click sounded, scarcely
+audible, right beside him as he escorted her to the dance floor.
+
+In spite of himself, Gruin thought of those words of Maria's father:
+"You killed her to be free from her. But you shall not be free. She
+will be with you always...."
+
+The blond smiled up at him.
+
+"Do you want to stand at the edge of the floor all evening? Or do you
+want to dance with me?"
+
+He smiled back and they danced. He heard the click only once in a while
+over the orchestra's rhythm. And he paid no attention to it. There were
+many high heels here, and all high heels make that clicking sound.
+He lost himself in the promises in the slightly hard blue eyes just
+below the level of his own eyes. And he stopped his ears to the queer
+clicking, which sounded as he moved, for the rest of the evening.
+
+But after he had left the blond and returned home, when he was walking
+from the garage to his grandfather's house, he couldn't stop his ears
+any more. The clicking was too infernally loud in the stillness that
+clutches city streets at three in the morning. And there wasn't a
+person within blocks that he could blame the noise on.
+
+Click, click, click came the sound, as he walked along through the
+night. Exactly as though a woman's high heels clicked beside him. High,
+_red_ heels....
+
+He stopped to light a cigarette which he thrust between disdainful,
+half-sneering lips. And the clicking stopped. He went on toward his
+grandfather's house--and the light, precise tapping continued, a click
+for every step he took, like a ghost-thing marching in step beside him.
+An unseen ghost-thing....
+
+"Hell take it!" he said angrily aloud in the night. "I suppose this is
+a sample of what they call remorse. Well I'll be damned if I----"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The light was on in the house. That was strange, at this hour of
+the night. Gruin hurried to the door--with the neat, small clicking
+increasing as his steps quickened. His grandfather opened the door
+before he could insert his key--and the old man was icily angry.
+
+"Eldon," he said, "I want to speak to you, in the library."
+
+Gruin followed him to the room in which he had received most of the old
+boy's rebukes. It was a psychological wood-shed where a verbal strap
+was applied to him. But this time the strap was unjustified to the
+point of being bizarre.
+
+"You have tried my patience to its extreme limit," the old man said,
+ice-blue eyes smoldering. "You have achieved your final indiscretion.
+How dare you bring a girl to this house and sneak her in when my back
+is turned? And above all, a girl named Maria--after what happened a few
+weeks ago? To this house!"
+
+Gruin's bewilderment was complete.
+
+"What on earth are you talking about?"
+
+"You deny you brought some girl to this house, to your room, secretly?"
+
+"I certainly do. I've never----"
+
+"Come upstairs, Eldon," the old man interrupted grimly.
+
+Gruin followed him from the library up to the second floor of the big
+house. And as he moved, some unseen thing seemed to move beside him.
+Very softly, almost furtively, the clicking tapped in rhythm with his
+step. They got to Gruin's suite, a big bedroom and bath and a small
+den, on the second floor. And there the old man pointed. He pointed
+toward a great leather chair by a flat-topped desk. There was nothing
+in the chair.
+
+Gruin turned with a puzzled frown to his grandfather. And then, without
+going to the chair, he caught the odor that emanated from it--a faint
+perfume that filled the den--an odor of hyacinth.
+
+Maria José had always used that scent. Hyacinth.
+
+"Some woman has been in this room," the old man accused sternly. "The
+scent proves it. And her name was Maria. _That_, scribbled no doubt
+idly while she sat with you here, proves it!"
+
+Gruin walked to his writing-desk. He wasn't quite aware of how he got
+there. He knew only that in a minute he stood by the desk looking down
+at it--at a torn scrap of paper on the blotter--at one word, faintly
+scrawled on the paper.
+
+"Maria."
+
+And it was Maria José's handwriting.
+
+At the pallor on his grandson's face, the old man promptly forgot all
+charges of ribaldry. He caught Eldon Gruin and helped him to another
+chair, and then called the butler and a doctor....
+
+Gruin was a strong-minded person. You have to be to plan and execute
+deliberate, cold-blooded murder. It wasn't long before a logical
+explanation occurred to him, and he drove to the shop of Maria's father.
+
+"You broke into our house," he accused. "You set a stage in my
+room--dropped perfume of the kind your daughter used on my chair, and
+wrote her name on a scrap of paper, imitating her handwriting, on my
+desk."
+
+He had come there confident in his conviction. But that conviction
+slowly faded as he looked into José's eyes. Dark eyes, smoldering,
+mystic, so like Maria's eyes.
+
+"You know it was not I who was there," José said in his pedantic,
+accented English.
+
+Just that. Nothing more. Gruin turned and almost ran from the basement
+shop. And as he hurried, beside him hurried unseen little heels that
+clicked and clicked with each swift step he took. They followed him out
+the door, a little behind him as he rushed, and to his car. And there
+they stopped.
+
+But he thought he saw the seat cushion beside him give a little with an
+unseen weight as he drove away....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A strong-minded person in good health--that was Eldon Gruin. There was
+no insanity in the Gruin family. Yet in the days that followed he began
+more and more to fear, with a mighty fear, that he was going mad. For
+always he heard the little heel taps beside him as he walked, stopping
+when he stopped, beginning again when he went on. And always in his
+brain was José's curse, "_She will be with you always, beside you,
+walking when you walk, stopping when you stop. Always, always beside
+you._..."
+
+So Gruin came to know the worst fear the known holds for us: fear of
+madness. But that fear did not last long. It very speedily deepened
+into that last ultimate horror--of the _un_known--which can prey on a
+man's mind.
+
+Mad because he seemed to hear the weird clicking of heels beside him?
+_Seemed_ to hear?
+
+He went into the library one night when his grandfather sat at his
+desk, reading. It was late, and the house was very still. The old man's
+senses were excellent. He didn't become aware of Gruin's entrance for
+a moment, but then he glanced up quickly, with a slightly surprized
+expression.
+
+"Oh," he said, carelessly. "You're alone."
+
+"Of course. Why?"
+
+"It sounded for a moment as though there were two of you," the old man
+said. "A sort of clicking. It must have been your hard heels against
+the floor."
+
+Gruin managed to get out of there without letting his grandfather see
+the chaos in his brain. But he staggered like a drunken man after
+leaving the library.
+
+"Sounded as though there were two of you ... must have been your hard
+heels against the floor." God! Gruin didn't wear hard leather heels.
+Every shoe he owned had rubber on it.
+
+"A sort of clicking...."
+
+The clicking of Maria José's small red heels as they twinkled unseen
+beside him! Maria José, who had died in flame and ruin at the bottom of
+the cliff!
+
+He was _not_ mad, then. The sound he had thought to hear in madness,
+actually was there to be heard. And then Gruin knew that ultimate
+horror which comes with the unknown. For if the sound really was there,
+perceptible enough for others to hear it, the cause of the sound must
+be there too!
+
+A dead girl walking beside him! A thing from some unknown sphere!
+"_Walking when you walk, stopping when you stop_----"
+
+"I walk with death!" Gruin told himself, shuddering, with the icy sweat
+of horror on his forehead.
+
+Red heels clicking beside him, as small, unseen feet kept time with
+his. As Maria had kept time when they walked down the street together.
+With one difference. Maria, alive, had been unable to match his strides
+when he increased them to their full masculine length. Maria, dead,
+could do that. He caught himself crazily shortening and lengthening
+his step as he walked down the street--with people turning to look
+curiously after him. But no matter how he walked, the unseen little
+heels beside him clicked in even pace.
+
+Walking with death. Escorting a dead girl wherever he went. Sometimes
+Gruin talked with her, damning her, whispering curses, telling her to
+get back to the grave from which she had come. And more people began to
+turn to look after him as he walked the streets.
+
+His grandfather and his friends began asking him what was wrong, and he
+couldn't tell them. His grandfather sent him to a great psychiatrist,
+and Gruin couldn't tell him what was wrong, either. Confession as
+to what was wrong with him lay too dangerously close to a murder
+confession.
+
+Red heels clicking always with him as he walked, stopping when he
+stopped, beginning again when he moved ... the red heels of Maria who
+had been sent by him to death over the edge of a cliff....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He drove in his coupé to the street-end where the roadster had crashed
+over the wooden barrier and plummeted to piles of rock below, while he
+hung from the branch over the road.
+
+There was no wooden barrier there now. There was a concrete wall,
+hastily erected after the "accident." It was a thick wall. It would
+stand any shock. Or--would it?
+
+Gruin got out of the coupé and went to the wall. As he strode, beside
+him sounded the quick, half-dancing, half-marching accompaniment.
+
+Gruin shuddered, as much with cold as with ever-present horror. He
+weighed only a hundred and twenty pounds, as against his former hundred
+and eighty, and the winter wind seemed to go through his coat and to
+his bones.
+
+The wall was pretty solid. He walked along it. And, click, click,
+click, click, walked the unseen Thing beside him.
+
+"Solid," he said aloud, chuckling a little and then jerking his head
+around to see if anyone had heard him. "Not so easy to send anybody
+over the edge here, now."
+
+He stood on top of the wall and stared down. The piles of crushed stone
+were still there; it had been too cold for work on the dock.
+
+"That's where you went, damn you," he mumbled to the Thing in the
+phantom red heels that clicked beside him. Beside him--even as he
+walked down the wall with nothing but thin air on either side.
+
+He began to chuckle again, aloud, craftily.
+
+"Nobody's ever suspected, except your father. And he can't hurt me any.
+Nobody knows I killed you."
+
+He stepped down from the wall. And beside him a click sounded, a
+little louder than usual, the click of a red heel coming down from the
+two-foot step from the top of the wall.
+
+"_Damn you!_" Gruin shouted. And then he pressed his hand to his lips.
+On the highway, several blocks away, a hitch-hiker stared curiously at
+him, then went on his way, signaling for rides.
+
+"Shouldn't be out here," Gruin muttered laboriously.
+
+He started for the coupé, parked a dozen yards from the new concrete
+wall. Dully he strode toward it. And as he walked, with each step came
+the accompanying small tap of little red heels, almost coinciding with
+his step on the ice of the road.
+
+"Better not come out here again," he mumbled, "I'm safe now. But
+somebody might see me here and think it was funny--might start
+investigating the accident again."
+
+He got into the coupé, settling laboriously behind the wheel. And then,
+as his eyes strayed sideways, his teeth met through his upper lip.
+
+Always when he got into his car--which was often, as he drove a great
+deal to save walking and hearing the tapping heels beside him--he
+strove to keep his eyes from going sideways, to the cushion beside him.
+And always he was unsuccessful.
+
+And always he saw the same thing--saw the seat cushion give a little as
+though someone had sat down there, next to him.
+
+He saw it now.
+
+"Damn you--damn you----" he cried brokenly.
+
+The motor of the coupé was thrumming, responding to the mechanical
+touch of his foot to the starter. The depression in the seat beside him
+shifted a little.
+
+"_You'll go back to hell where you came from!_"
+
+Like another person, Gruin heard those words keen from his lips. Like
+another person he heard the motor roar into full-throated power as his
+foot jammed down on the accelerator.
+
+"No," he breathed, as his hand slid the gear-shift lever into first.
+Like another person, pleading, remonstrating--and being unheeded. "No!"
+
+The motor bellowed, the coupé's tires screamed as they felt full and
+sudden power applied. The car leaped forward.
+
+"_Oh, my God, no_----"
+
+The car, nearly two tons of steel, hit the concrete wall with all the
+power of the great motor, in first gear, behind it--hit the wall,
+crumpled, then crunched on through. The thunder of the coupé's crash on
+the rock far below shocked the late February afternoon....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Remorse, they called it. Eldon Gruin was so weighed down by the
+carelessness that had taken a life that he had gone to the scene of the
+accident and committed suicide by driving his car over the same cliff.
+
+That was what was in the papers. What was not in them was something
+else; something that puzzled detectives for a while, till they gave it
+up as irrelevant, since they had no knowledge of the little red heels
+of Maria that had clicked beside Gruin from the time of her death.
+
+That was, the curious thing found in each heel of each shoe that
+Eldon Gruin owned--a little sliding weight that had been inserted and
+re-covered by some deft cobbler. They didn't move when the shoes were
+handled, unless they were shifted briskly up and down as a person
+walking would move them. Then they made small clicking noises in unison
+with the movements....
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76644 ***
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+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76644 ***</div>
+
+<div class="titlepage">
+
+<h1>Clicking Red Heels</h1>
+
+<p class="ph1">By PAUL ERNST</p>
+
+<p><i>Nobody knew that Gruin had killed his<br>
+sweetheart, but her little red heels tapped<br>
+a march of death wherever he went, driving<br>
+him to a desperate resolve.</i></p>
+
+<p>[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from<br>
+Weird Tales June 1937.<br>
+Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that<br>
+the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap">
+
+<p>There are two kinds of fear. There is fear of the known—terror of
+death or disease or accident, or of social consequences of wrong
+actions. This is bad enough, but it is a little thing compared to fear
+of the unknown. <i>That</i> is the horror that freezes your brain and stops
+your breath in your throat; <i>that</i> is the terror that wrings sweat
+in icy drops from your clammy skin. Somewhere near you a black force
+lurks, some shadow from a hell incomprehensible to mortal mind, some
+<i>thing</i> from another world which looms over you and threatens you with
+a menace all the more awful for being unguessable. It is then that you
+go mad and babble in your frightful torment of danger—and cannot even
+say what that danger is....</p>
+
+<p>Eldon Gruin was in the grip of the first fear. He was to know the
+second, too; but at the time he knew only the first, and thought that
+bad enough. His fear was of the consequences of a wrong act, and it was
+embodied in a girl.</p>
+
+<p>The name of Gruin's fear was Maria José, whose father cut and stitched
+leather in the repair of shoes in a dingy basement shop on Eighth
+Avenue in New York. Her father was a gargoyle of a man, alone in the
+world save for his Maria. But Maria—ah, she was a throw-back to some
+Castilian ancestress who supplied inspiration for the fiery men who
+made Spain unconquerable.</p>
+
+<p>Maria had great black eyes with ridiculously long lashes, and a
+perfect, dainty oval of a face, and red, red lips, and a body that
+sculptors in old Greece would have loved, and tiny feet on which—as
+a sort of symbol of her mercurial temperament and gayety—were always
+red-heeled shoes. They danced, those red-heeled small shoes, in a sort
+of gay, mad rhythm of their own as Maria clicked down the street in
+them. They had danced into hearts and out again, with an unsatisfying
+trill of laughter before they carried their shapely, tempestuous young
+owner into Gruin's life.</p>
+
+<p>It was all inconsequential, a thing no sane person should have built
+hopes on, Gruin often reflected irritably.</p>
+
+<p>He was thirty-one, fairly wealthy, single, and out for fun. He had
+met her at a night club where—till the fat proprietor had tried to
+mix intimacy with managership—Maria had danced for a little while
+professionally, in twinkling white satin pumps with red heels.</p>
+
+<p>Gruin had made her a few promises, perhaps. A man does when he is
+captivated. And Maria had begun to cling. At first it had been
+exhilarating. Men looked after her when she clicked up the sidewalk on
+those ridiculous, pathetic, appropriate little red heels to meet him.
+Gruin, who was not bad-looking, knew that he and Maria made a striking
+pair together.</p>
+
+<p>Nice to have a girl like that live only for your whims. Intoxicating
+to have such beauty almost abjectly at your command. Exhilarating to
+the ego to know that you can turn on such a love-stream. Natural to
+forget that it might be difficult to turn that love-stream off again.</p>
+
+<p>It wasn't long before Gruin had found that he was driving a force that
+could not be controlled much longer. And then it was annoying. No, more
+than that—it was rather terrifying!</p>
+
+<p>So he sat in the Lance Club lounge the afternoon of the evening which
+was to be the turning-point in his not very useful young life, and
+condemned Maria José.</p>
+
+<p>Any girl with any sense would have known that the affair must be
+transient. She was a garlic-eating cobbler's daughter. He was heir to
+a modest fortune and owned an old name. Had she seriously thought he
+meant to—marry her? She couldn't have! Yet she was certainly acting
+like it now.</p>
+
+<p>Gruin shifted in the leather club chair and sipped some of his
+cocktail. And he felt faint perspiration steal out on the palms of his
+hands as he reviewed Maria's recent conduct.</p>
+
+<p>When she clicked up on her red heels to meet him now, it was more often
+than not to burst into tears because she hadn't seen him last night
+or the night before—she demanded all of his time. When he talked of
+taking a trip, she stared deep into his eyes, tearful no longer, and
+advised him not to. There had been a newspaper rumor of his engagement
+to a debutante in New York, and——</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Gruin sipped his cocktail again. Rather, he gulped it for strength. He
+had at first thought it cute and picturesque of Maria that she carried
+a little knife in her garter just above her beautiful right knee. He
+didn't think it was at all cute now. So Gruin sat in the lounge of the
+sleek, quiet club and knew what had to be done.</p>
+
+<p>He had started something with Maria that would never die while she
+lived. If he tried to slide out of her life, she would raise a scandal
+that would ruin him with his righteous grandfather, from whom all
+monetary blessings flowed. If he tried to leave town, she would follow.
+If he tried to get it over quickly and finally by marrying some girl of
+his own class——</p>
+
+<p>The knife at her knee was small, but it was slim and sharp, and it had
+been flashed more than once before his white face.</p>
+
+<p>Living, Maria, the cobbler's daughter, was a constant menace to Eldon
+Gruin. So Maria must die.</p>
+
+<p>Gruin shivered a little in the big leather chair in the luxurious
+lounge. Murder is a large order, even when you're as sure you can get
+away with it as Gruin was. In addition, there was a dim realization
+in the back of his mind that the Josés, father and daughter, were
+not quite as other people were. There was something a little—well,
+mystic—in their vital black eyes.</p>
+
+<p>The one time when Gruin had consented indifferently to meet Maria's
+father they had come upon him in the back room of his solitary
+sweatshop, talking. Talking—with no one else in the room. Talking to
+her mother, his dead wife, Maria had explained seriously, afterward.
+And in the man's deep-set eyes had been a flame that killed laughter on
+Gruin's lips. Something in the spirit and soul of the Josés, father and
+daughter, that set them a little apart from others—something mystic
+and unknown....</p>
+
+<p>"Hell," said Gruin, finishing his cocktail and grimacing contemptuously
+at himself.</p>
+
+<p>He was a fool. He was imagining things. Maria was just a girl—a woman
+whose ardent infatuation had grown to the point where it threatened a
+fortune he was to inherit, and his whole future life and good name. He
+could imagine his grandfather's disinheritance speech if he presented
+the mercurial cobbler's daughter in the gaudy red heels as his wife!</p>
+
+<p>"It's my life or hers," Gruin told himself, to stifle the gray fear of
+murder—even so easy and fool-proof a murder as he had in mind.</p>
+
+<p>And with the gray fear lulled by what he chose to call the inevitable,
+he had dinner at the club and then went to meet Maria....</p>
+
+<p>He met her at Eighth Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street at a little
+after half-past eight. She clicked over the sidewalk in her red heels
+to the curb, glowing and beautiful in a squirrel coat which he had
+indiscreetly called an "engagement" present when he offered it—because
+otherwise she would not have accepted it.</p>
+
+<p>"Eldon! My darling! You are late. I have waited and waited."</p>
+
+<p>"I said, eight-thirty," Gruin mumbled.</p>
+
+<p>"I did not want to wait that long. I could not. I have been here since
+before eight.... Sweetheart, you haven't said you love me...."</p>
+
+<p>Gruin opened the door of his roadster and she got in.</p>
+
+<p>"Eldon, this waiting and waiting—I cannot understand it. When are we
+going to—to stand before Father Mollé, so I will be with you always?"</p>
+
+<p>"Very soon," Gruin said, sliding into gear. "You will not have to wait
+for me ever again."</p>
+
+<p>Up Riverside Drive they went, across the Hudson and up the Palisades,
+to a place where they had parked often at night during the spring and
+summer and fall—a place that had given Gruin courage to do murder by
+simplifying it.</p>
+
+<p>There was a spot where you drove off the crowded highway, down half a
+block of unfinished dirt road with a low wooden rail at the end. The
+rail barred the street-end from a hundred-foot drop down the cliffside
+to piles of crushed rock that were to be a new dock soon. And the rail
+was very flimsy and a little rotten. And there was a great tree that
+grew at the cliff's edge and flung one branch straight over the road so
+low that a car's top almost scraped it.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Another car was parked in the road-end when Gruin got there with Maria,
+in spite of the December cold. Gruin had to wait for this car to leave.
+He put his arm around Maria, meanwhile gazing upward to be sure that he
+had stopped the roadster directly under the low branch of the big tree.</p>
+
+<p>"It is cold," said Maria, shivering in spite of her fur. "Would we not
+be warmer with the top up?"</p>
+
+<p>"The air tastes good," said Gruin hastily. It would ruin his plan if
+the roadster's top were put up. He had to have a clear space above him.</p>
+
+<p>The other car left. He and Maria were alone in the open roadster under
+the December stars.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you sick?" said Maria, gazing at him in the dashlight.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no. Not at all," said Gruin, whose teeth showed a tendency to
+chatter.</p>
+
+<p>Maria looked deep into his eyes. Something mystic and inexorable in her
+black ones....</p>
+
+<p>"Eldon, you are acting very strangely. It is not that you are thinking
+of breaking your promise?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course not," Gruin said hastily.</p>
+
+<p>Maria's eyes still searched his, aflame with infatuation, and with
+tempestuous resolve. The light from the roadster's dash showed on
+little red heels, on a length of silk stocking that even now could make
+Gruin's pulses jerk a trifle, on soft white flesh with a twisted garter
+under it—on a slim little dagger! Then slowly her skirt went down
+again.</p>
+
+<p>"I think we'd better leave," Gruin said, a trifle thickly. God! this
+was the kind of thing you read about in the funny papers. You didn't
+dream, at first, that it would force you to murder....</p>
+
+<p>"We'll go," he said hoarsely.</p>
+
+<p>He started the car, and shifted to first gear with the clutch pressed
+down. He raced the motor, pulling out the hand throttle on the dash so
+that the engine speed would maintain itself.</p>
+
+<p>"Why are you making the engine go so fast?" said Maria.</p>
+
+<p>"The motor's cold—have to warm it up...."</p>
+
+<p>With the words, Gruin stood up suddenly, as nearly erect as the wheel
+would let him. His fingers hooked over the overhanging tree branch—and
+his foot left the clutch.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap">
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+  <img src="images/illus.jpg" alt="">
+  <div class="caption">
+    <p>"His fingers hooked over the branch and his foot left the clutch."</p>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap">
+
+<p>The scream of tires spinning from sudden power of a roaring,
+full-throttled motor mingled with Maria José's shriek. The roadster
+leaped toward the wooden rail at the edge of the cliff, with Gruin
+hanging over the road behind.</p>
+
+<p>Maria's fingers tore at his legs as she sought to clutch him, and his
+left heel ground into her face, forcing her back in the seat. The
+roadster smashed through the wooden rail, teetered for just an instant
+on the edge of the cliff, then plunged forward.</p>
+
+<p>The noise of nearly two tons of metal smashing on rock a hundred feet
+below, shocked the night. And Gruin dropped into the road and ran to
+the edge. He looked down.</p>
+
+<p>Flame was rising from the wreck far below. He saw a black cascade in
+the path of the flame. Maria's hair. He was whimpering a little as he
+moved, without being conscious of it. There was a ledge ten feet down,
+with a thick bush growing from it. He lowered himself to that, clung to
+it, and began shouting for help....</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It all went as he had thought it would. The papers got just the right
+angle.</p>
+
+<p>A Gruin, scion of one of the city's best-known, if not richest,
+families, had been out with some girl named Maria José. He had parked
+at the edge of the Palisades. Probably there'd been a little drinking.
+When leaving, he had carelessly shifted the gear lever forward into
+second instead of forward into reverse. The car had plunged over the
+cliff carrying both of them, but he had been thrown out and had caught
+a bush which saved his life. The girl had gone on down—to death.</p>
+
+<p>There was unfavorable publicity; there were infuriated lectures
+from his grandfather; there was talk of prosecution for criminal
+carelessness.</p>
+
+<p>And that was all. With one clever stroke Gruin had gotten rid of
+a danger that had grown to intolerable proportions in his life.
+Decorously he went to the funeral in which a girl's shattered body was
+lowered into the ground. And afterward, Maria's father came up to him.</p>
+
+<p>Gruin looked hastily around. There was no one near, and he was a little
+afraid of the somber fire in the man's deep-set black eyes. He had aged
+twenty years. He looked like a gargoyle with an iron-gray beard and
+white hair.</p>
+
+<p>"You killed Maria," he said, with the words coming slowly and painfully.</p>
+
+<p>"I know." Gruin's face took on a contrite and sympathetic expression.
+"A terrible accident——"</p>
+
+<p>"That is not what I mean," said Maria's father. "It was not accident.
+<i>I know.</i> You killed my girl on purpose. <i>You murdered her!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no! I swear——"</p>
+
+<p>Gruin stopped at the look in his eyes. And José went on, slowly,
+painfully, with every word ringing in Gruin's brain.</p>
+
+<p>"I bring her curse on your head. You killed her to be free from her.
+But you shall not be free. She will be with you always, beside you,
+walking when you walk, stopping when you stop. Always, always beside
+you...."</p>
+
+<p>Gruin got away from there, and also, he was sure, away from all that
+had threatened him.</p>
+
+<p>There were, when all the smoke had cleared away, no consequences at
+all. The charges of criminal carelessness never materialized. His
+grandfather, unconcerned with death, finally forgave him for wasting a
+few evenings with a cheap unknown named Maria. The world didn't dream
+that the tragedy at the cliff was not an accident. He had murdered
+successfully....</p>
+
+<p>And then he strolled from his grandfather's house one evening, bent for
+an engagement with a girl almost as beautiful as Maria had been and
+much more sensible, and a queer thing happened.</p>
+
+<p>As he walked across the curb from door to car—a big new coupé to
+take the place of the roadster—he heard someone walking beside him.
+At least he thought for a moment that he had heard steps matching his
+own. But he saw an instant later that he had been wrong, because when
+he turned around, there was no one on the sidewalk. No one within half
+a block of him.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He got into the coupé and drove to the apartment of the girl he had the
+engagement with. Again, as he walked from curb to building door, he
+heard steps sound out beside him—possibly a little behind him, that
+matched his steps. But he scarcely thought twice about it, because
+there were half a dozen people around him here, and any one of them
+could have made the sound.</p>
+
+<p>He had one vague and irrelevant memory as he opened the vestibule door.
+It was a memory of Maria and him walking down the street. Striving to
+match his moods, Maria also, laughingly, strove to match his strides.
+She tried to keep her small red heels clicking on the walk in time with
+his steps. He had often teased her about it, taking longer and slower
+strides that taxed her smallness more and more till finally she simply
+could not keep step with him and would break rhythm with a gay laugh.</p>
+
+<p>Maria and he, walking down the street, with her absurd red heels
+clicking in time with his step....</p>
+
+<p>He thrust the picture aside and went up deep-carpeted halls and
+stairways to the apartment of the blond with the slightly hard blue
+eyes with whom he had a date. And they went to a Broadway club and
+danced.</p>
+
+<p>During the evening, Gruin cursed his memory for bringing back the
+picture of himself and Maria walking, with her red heels tapping the
+time of his steps. Because, after that recollection, his imagination
+really began to play tricks on him.</p>
+
+<p>He began to hear heels clicking with each of his steps as he moved. Not
+just now and then, but all the time.</p>
+
+<p>When he stood up from the table as the orchestra started, and walked
+around to help the blond with her chair, he heard a precise little
+heel-click with each stride he took. The click sounded, scarcely
+audible, right beside him as he escorted her to the dance floor.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of himself, Gruin thought of those words of Maria's father:
+"You killed her to be free from her. But you shall not be free. She
+will be with you always...."</p>
+
+<p>The blond smiled up at him.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you want to stand at the edge of the floor all evening? Or do you
+want to dance with me?"</p>
+
+<p>He smiled back and they danced. He heard the click only once in a while
+over the orchestra's rhythm. And he paid no attention to it. There were
+many high heels here, and all high heels make that clicking sound.
+He lost himself in the promises in the slightly hard blue eyes just
+below the level of his own eyes. And he stopped his ears to the queer
+clicking, which sounded as he moved, for the rest of the evening.</p>
+
+<p>But after he had left the blond and returned home, when he was walking
+from the garage to his grandfather's house, he couldn't stop his ears
+any more. The clicking was too infernally loud in the stillness that
+clutches city streets at three in the morning. And there wasn't a
+person within blocks that he could blame the noise on.</p>
+
+<p>Click, click, click came the sound, as he walked along through the
+night. Exactly as though a woman's high heels clicked beside him. High,
+<i>red</i> heels....</p>
+
+<p>He stopped to light a cigarette which he thrust between disdainful,
+half-sneering lips. And the clicking stopped. He went on toward his
+grandfather's house—and the light, precise tapping continued, a click
+for every step he took, like a ghost-thing marching in step beside him.
+An unseen ghost-thing....</p>
+
+<p>"Hell take it!" he said angrily aloud in the night. "I suppose this is
+a sample of what they call remorse. Well I'll be damned if I——"</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The light was on in the house. That was strange, at this hour of
+the night. Gruin hurried to the door—with the neat, small clicking
+increasing as his steps quickened. His grandfather opened the door
+before he could insert his key—and the old man was icily angry.</p>
+
+<p>"Eldon," he said, "I want to speak to you, in the library."</p>
+
+<p>Gruin followed him to the room in which he had received most of the old
+boy's rebukes. It was a psychological wood-shed where a verbal strap
+was applied to him. But this time the strap was unjustified to the
+point of being bizarre.</p>
+
+<p>"You have tried my patience to its extreme limit," the old man said,
+ice-blue eyes smoldering. "You have achieved your final indiscretion.
+How dare you bring a girl to this house and sneak her in when my back
+is turned? And above all, a girl named Maria—after what happened a few
+weeks ago? To this house!"</p>
+
+<p>Gruin's bewilderment was complete.</p>
+
+<p>"What on earth are you talking about?"</p>
+
+<p>"You deny you brought some girl to this house, to your room, secretly?"</p>
+
+<p>"I certainly do. I've never——"</p>
+
+<p>"Come upstairs, Eldon," the old man interrupted grimly.</p>
+
+<p>Gruin followed him from the library up to the second floor of the big
+house. And as he moved, some unseen thing seemed to move beside him.
+Very softly, almost furtively, the clicking tapped in rhythm with his
+step. They got to Gruin's suite, a big bedroom and bath and a small
+den, on the second floor. And there the old man pointed. He pointed
+toward a great leather chair by a flat-topped desk. There was nothing
+in the chair.</p>
+
+<p>Gruin turned with a puzzled frown to his grandfather. And then, without
+going to the chair, he caught the odor that emanated from it—a faint
+perfume that filled the den—an odor of hyacinth.</p>
+
+<p>Maria José had always used that scent. Hyacinth.</p>
+
+<p>"Some woman has been in this room," the old man accused sternly. "The
+scent proves it. And her name was Maria. <i>That</i>, scribbled no doubt
+idly while she sat with you here, proves it!"</p>
+
+<p>Gruin walked to his writing-desk. He wasn't quite aware of how he got
+there. He knew only that in a minute he stood by the desk looking down
+at it—at a torn scrap of paper on the blotter—at one word, faintly
+scrawled on the paper.</p>
+
+<p>"Maria."</p>
+
+<p>And it was Maria José's handwriting.</p>
+
+<p>At the pallor on his grandson's face, the old man promptly forgot all
+charges of ribaldry. He caught Eldon Gruin and helped him to another
+chair, and then called the butler and a doctor....</p>
+
+<p>Gruin was a strong-minded person. You have to be to plan and execute
+deliberate, cold-blooded murder. It wasn't long before a logical
+explanation occurred to him, and he drove to the shop of Maria's father.</p>
+
+<p>"You broke into our house," he accused. "You set a stage in my
+room—dropped perfume of the kind your daughter used on my chair, and
+wrote her name on a scrap of paper, imitating her handwriting, on my
+desk."</p>
+
+<p>He had come there confident in his conviction. But that conviction
+slowly faded as he looked into José's eyes. Dark eyes, smoldering,
+mystic, so like Maria's eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"You know it was not I who was there," José said in his pedantic,
+accented English.</p>
+
+<p>Just that. Nothing more. Gruin turned and almost ran from the basement
+shop. And as he hurried, beside him hurried unseen little heels that
+clicked and clicked with each swift step he took. They followed him out
+the door, a little behind him as he rushed, and to his car. And there
+they stopped.</p>
+
+<p>But he thought he saw the seat cushion beside him give a little with an
+unseen weight as he drove away....</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>A strong-minded person in good health—that was Eldon Gruin. There was
+no insanity in the Gruin family. Yet in the days that followed he began
+more and more to fear, with a mighty fear, that he was going mad. For
+always he heard the little heel taps beside him as he walked, stopping
+when he stopped, beginning again when he went on. And always in his
+brain was José's curse, "<i>She will be with you always, beside you,
+walking when you walk, stopping when you stop. Always, always beside
+you.</i>..."</p>
+
+<p>So Gruin came to know the worst fear the known holds for us: fear of
+madness. But that fear did not last long. It very speedily deepened
+into that last ultimate horror—of the <i>un</i>known—which can prey on a
+man's mind.</p>
+
+<p>Mad because he seemed to hear the weird clicking of heels beside him?
+<i>Seemed</i> to hear?</p>
+
+<p>He went into the library one night when his grandfather sat at his
+desk, reading. It was late, and the house was very still. The old man's
+senses were excellent. He didn't become aware of Gruin's entrance for
+a moment, but then he glanced up quickly, with a slightly surprized
+expression.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," he said, carelessly. "You're alone."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course. Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"It sounded for a moment as though there were two of you," the old man
+said. "A sort of clicking. It must have been your hard heels against
+the floor."</p>
+
+<p>Gruin managed to get out of there without letting his grandfather see
+the chaos in his brain. But he staggered like a drunken man after
+leaving the library.</p>
+
+<p>"Sounded as though there were two of you ... must have been your hard
+heels against the floor." God! Gruin didn't wear hard leather heels.
+Every shoe he owned had rubber on it.</p>
+
+<p>"A sort of clicking...."</p>
+
+<p>The clicking of Maria José's small red heels as they twinkled unseen
+beside him! Maria José, who had died in flame and ruin at the bottom of
+the cliff!</p>
+
+<p>He was <i>not</i> mad, then. The sound he had thought to hear in madness,
+actually was there to be heard. And then Gruin knew that ultimate
+horror which comes with the unknown. For if the sound really was there,
+perceptible enough for others to hear it, the cause of the sound must
+be there too!</p>
+
+<p>A dead girl walking beside him! A thing from some unknown sphere!
+"<i>Walking when you walk, stopping when you stop</i>——"</p>
+
+<p>"I walk with death!" Gruin told himself, shuddering, with the icy sweat
+of horror on his forehead.</p>
+
+<p>Red heels clicking beside him, as small, unseen feet kept time with
+his. As Maria had kept time when they walked down the street together.
+With one difference. Maria, alive, had been unable to match his strides
+when he increased them to their full masculine length. Maria, dead,
+could do that. He caught himself crazily shortening and lengthening
+his step as he walked down the street—with people turning to look
+curiously after him. But no matter how he walked, the unseen little
+heels beside him clicked in even pace.</p>
+
+<p>Walking with death. Escorting a dead girl wherever he went. Sometimes
+Gruin talked with her, damning her, whispering curses, telling her to
+get back to the grave from which she had come. And more people began to
+turn to look after him as he walked the streets.</p>
+
+<p>His grandfather and his friends began asking him what was wrong, and he
+couldn't tell them. His grandfather sent him to a great psychiatrist,
+and Gruin couldn't tell him what was wrong, either. Confession as
+to what was wrong with him lay too dangerously close to a murder
+confession.</p>
+
+<p>Red heels clicking always with him as he walked, stopping when he
+stopped, beginning again when he moved ... the red heels of Maria who
+had been sent by him to death over the edge of a cliff....</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He drove in his coupé to the street-end where the roadster had crashed
+over the wooden barrier and plummeted to piles of rock below, while he
+hung from the branch over the road.</p>
+
+<p>There was no wooden barrier there now. There was a concrete wall,
+hastily erected after the "accident." It was a thick wall. It would
+stand any shock. Or—would it?</p>
+
+<p>Gruin got out of the coupé and went to the wall. As he strode, beside
+him sounded the quick, half-dancing, half-marching accompaniment.</p>
+
+<p>Gruin shuddered, as much with cold as with ever-present horror. He
+weighed only a hundred and twenty pounds, as against his former hundred
+and eighty, and the winter wind seemed to go through his coat and to
+his bones.</p>
+
+<p>The wall was pretty solid. He walked along it. And, click, click,
+click, click, walked the unseen Thing beside him.</p>
+
+<p>"Solid," he said aloud, chuckling a little and then jerking his head
+around to see if anyone had heard him. "Not so easy to send anybody
+over the edge here, now."</p>
+
+<p>He stood on top of the wall and stared down. The piles of crushed stone
+were still there; it had been too cold for work on the dock.</p>
+
+<p>"That's where you went, damn you," he mumbled to the Thing in the
+phantom red heels that clicked beside him. Beside him—even as he
+walked down the wall with nothing but thin air on either side.</p>
+
+<p>He began to chuckle again, aloud, craftily.</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody's ever suspected, except your father. And he can't hurt me any.
+Nobody knows I killed you."</p>
+
+<p>He stepped down from the wall. And beside him a click sounded, a
+little louder than usual, the click of a red heel coming down from the
+two-foot step from the top of the wall.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Damn you!</i>" Gruin shouted. And then he pressed his hand to his lips.
+On the highway, several blocks away, a hitch-hiker stared curiously at
+him, then went on his way, signaling for rides.</p>
+
+<p>"Shouldn't be out here," Gruin muttered laboriously.</p>
+
+<p>He started for the coupé, parked a dozen yards from the new concrete
+wall. Dully he strode toward it. And as he walked, with each step came
+the accompanying small tap of little red heels, almost coinciding with
+his step on the ice of the road.</p>
+
+<p>"Better not come out here again," he mumbled, "I'm safe now. But
+somebody might see me here and think it was funny—might start
+investigating the accident again."</p>
+
+<p>He got into the coupé, settling laboriously behind the wheel. And then,
+as his eyes strayed sideways, his teeth met through his upper lip.</p>
+
+<p>Always when he got into his car—which was often, as he drove a great
+deal to save walking and hearing the tapping heels beside him—he
+strove to keep his eyes from going sideways, to the cushion beside him.
+And always he was unsuccessful.</p>
+
+<p>And always he saw the same thing—saw the seat cushion give a little as
+though someone had sat down there, next to him.</p>
+
+<p>He saw it now.</p>
+
+<p>"Damn you—damn you——" he cried brokenly.</p>
+
+<p>The motor of the coupé was thrumming, responding to the mechanical
+touch of his foot to the starter. The depression in the seat beside him
+shifted a little.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>You'll go back to hell where you came from!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>Like another person, Gruin heard those words keen from his lips. Like
+another person he heard the motor roar into full-throated power as his
+foot jammed down on the accelerator.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he breathed, as his hand slid the gear-shift lever into first.
+Like another person, pleading, remonstrating—and being unheeded. "No!"</p>
+
+<p>The motor bellowed, the coupé's tires screamed as they felt full and
+sudden power applied. The car leaped forward.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Oh, my God, no</i>——"</p>
+
+<p>The car, nearly two tons of steel, hit the concrete wall with all the
+power of the great motor, in first gear, behind it—hit the wall,
+crumpled, then crunched on through. The thunder of the coupé's crash on
+the rock far below shocked the late February afternoon....</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Remorse, they called it. Eldon Gruin was so weighed down by the
+carelessness that had taken a life that he had gone to the scene of the
+accident and committed suicide by driving his car over the same cliff.</p>
+
+<p>That was what was in the papers. What was not in them was something
+else; something that puzzled detectives for a while, till they gave it
+up as irrelevant, since they had no knowledge of the little red heels
+of Maria that had clicked beside Gruin from the time of her death.</p>
+
+<p>That was, the curious thing found in each heel of each shoe that
+Eldon Gruin owned—a little sliding weight that had been inserted and
+re-covered by some deft cobbler. They didn't move when the shoes were
+handled, unless they were shifted briskly up and down as a person
+walking would move them. Then they made small clicking noises in unison
+with the movements....
+</p>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76644 ***</div>
+</body>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for eBook #76644
+(https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76644)