The Tell-Tale Heart

It is true that I have always been very nervous, but why do you say that I am mad?I loved the old man who lived in my house. He had never wronged me, and he had never insulted me.But one of his eyes was pale and blue, like the eye of a vulture, and every time it looked at me, my blood ran cold.

So I made up my mind to take the old man’s life, and be rid of that eye forever.Every night at midnight, I opened his door so slowly that not even a mouse could have heard me, and shone a single thin ray of lantern light on his sleeping face.For seven long nights I did this, but every night his terrible eye was closed, so I could not do the deed.

On the eighth night, my hand trembled a little, and the old man sat straight up in bed and called out, “Who’s there?”I stood still and silent for a whole hour, and then a thin ray of light fell across his pale blue eye, wide open in the darkness.Just then I heard a low, quick sound, like a watch wrapped in cotton, and I knew it was the beating of his terrified heart.

The sound grew louder and louder until I was sure the neighbors would hear it, so in one great rush I pulled him to the floor and silenced him forever.I hid the body in pieces beneath the floorboards of his room, working so carefully that no stain, no mark, was left behind.When the police arrived, called by a neighbor who had heard a single cry in the night, I welcomed them inside with an easy smile.

I brought chairs into the old man’s own room and sat calmly on the very floorboards that hid his body, answering every question without fear.But as we talked, I began to hear that same low, quick sound again, growing louder with every passing minute, until my head was ringing with it.I could bear it no longer — I sprang up and shrieked, “I confess! Tear up the floorboards! It is the beating of his hideous heart!”