Part 2

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....