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.