Edgar Allan Poe

The Tell-Tale Heart ♥

The Tell-Tale Heart is a story about a man who lives with an old man. The man tells the story of how he planned to kill the old man. He didn't want to kill because he didn't like him, it was because of his eye.

"He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture—a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees—very gradually—I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever."

Every night at midnight for seven days he would go into the room with a lantern and shine a small ray of light into the old man's eye. On the eight day, he does the same thing again, but then he leaped into the room and killed the old man. The old man before dying just gave a short shriek. He dismembers the body and puts it underneath the floor boards. There was no blood to clean because he had caught it all in a tub (Ha! Ha!). Then at around 4:oo A.M. some police officers came because a neighbor had heard a shriek. The man tells them that it was just him in a dream. The officers search the whole house and do not find anything. Then they sit down to talk and moments later the man hears a noise. He hears the old man's heart beating underneath the floor. He becomes more mad as the sound increases. Finally, his conscious gets him and he rips up the floor boards and confesses to the police officers the horrible crime that he had commited.