The Sixth Day of Poe: The Tell-Tale Heart

If there was ever a single story that chilled me it was The Tell-Tale Heart. The name alone invokes a shudder to creep up the spine and palms to sweat. I was young when I first heard it, as it was on a record of  horror stories. I can clearly recall watching the needle slide over the black glossy surface, watching it fall, and the scratching from the speakers that always preludes the start of a record playing.


The premise is of two men sharing lodging. The older man has a single eye that is a deformed vulture-like eye. This unnerving and strange eye so distresses the narrator, the younger gentleman, that he plans to murder his companion in order to free himself from the hideous eye. Anything to rid himself of that horrible eye.
As the story goes on one has to wonder if the man is truly insane or if he is just trying to convince himself, and the reader, that the eye was the only reason for the murder. His planning is meticulous and vengeful, and he takes a sadistic pleasure in the fear he invokes in the older man. Many nights he creeps to the older man's room and looks on him and, on the night of the murder, the younger man plays a game with the older in the dark.
"For a whole hour I did not move a muscle, and in the meantime I did not hear him lie down. He was still sitting up in the bed, listening;-just as I have done, night after night, harkening to the death watches in the wall..."
 The narrator drives the other man mad with the terror of knowing that there is someone, something, waiting in the dark. It is the fear of discovery, the older man's frantically beating heart growing ever louder, that moves him to ending it.
"With a loud yell, I threw open the lantern and leaped into the room. He shrieked once-once only. In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him. I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done. But, for many minutes, the heart beat on with a muffled sound. This, however, did not vex me; it would not be heard through the wall. At length it ceased. The old man was dead."
It is implied that the older man suffocated beneath the heavy mattress and, in order to conceal the event, the body is dismembered and buried beneath the floor. If this is not premeditation, nothing is.
What follows is inevitable. Madness overcomes the mind (if it hadn't already) and revenge is sought, seemingly from beyond the grave. The passion of the crime has faded, but not the pleasure of the event, and when the police come the young man is confident that he is beyond suspicion.
And yet, a heart beats in his ears. It beats in a steady, powerful, unending rhythm.
Guilty, it beats.
Guilty. Guilty.


The story of The Tell-Tale Heart is one of slow building madness, murder, and a free-fall into greater insanity, is intense on its own. The actor's voice getting more and more frantic as the beating heart in the background grows louder and louder, made it one of the most anticipated and, in all honesty, feared stories of the collection.


NOTE: here is a link to a video on YouTube of Vincent Price (who is one of the best actors of ALL TIME) reciting The Tell-Tale Heart. Watch and be chilled by the performance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LNjgv5p3Ek
And the second part here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM-tAb-bM-s&feature=relmfu

Thank-you to Mirkodamian for posting it!