The Cask of Amontillado

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as well as I could, but when he went so far as to insult me, I vowed revenge. I made no threats; a man who announces his revenge has already half lost it. A wrong is not repaid if the avenger is caught, nor if the victim never learns whose hand struck him. So I kept my face friendly, and every smile I gave him was a small rehearsal for his ruin.

Fortunato had a weak spot: he prided himself on knowing more about wine than any man in the city. I found him one evening at dusk, when the carnival was at its wildest. He had been drinking, and he was dressed as a jester, in a striped costume and a pointed cap hung with bells. I greeted him as warmly as if he had been my oldest friend.

"Fortunato!" I cried. "Just the man I need. A merchant has sold me a cask he swears is Amontillado, and I'm not convinced. But you're enjoying the carnival, so I'll ask Luchesi instead. If he can't tell real Amontillado from ordinary sherry, nobody can." The name worked on him like a spur. Luchesi, he said scornfully, wouldn't know Amontillado if he fell into a barrel of it, and he insisted that we go down to my vaults at once.

I had announced that I would be away until morning and had ordered my servants to stay at home. I knew them well: an order like that would empty the house within the hour. We went down a spiral of stone steps into the catacombs beneath the house, where generations of my family lie. The walls glittered with nitre, and the damp set off a cough in Fortunato so violent that he could hardly stand. More than once I begged him to turn back. "If you caught a fever down here because of me," I told him, "I'd never forgive myself." A cough, he said, had never killed anyone. "Quite true," I replied, and opened a bottle of Medoc for him against the cold.

Further on, he asked what the arms of my family looked like. A huge golden foot on a field of blue, I told him, crushing a serpent whose fangs are sunk in its heel. And the motto? Nemo me impune lacessit: no one provokes me and goes unpunished. He laughed, drained the bottle and flung it away, his bells ringing down the tunnel.

The passage ended in a low crypt, and in its far wall a narrow recess had been left in the rock. "The Amontillado is in there," I said. He lurched forward, too drunk to see that the recess led nowhere, and before he could turn, I had locked him to an iron ring in the rock with a chain I had left there. From under a heap of bones I took the stone and mortar I had hidden there and began the wall.

By the fourth row he had sobered up, and a long scream came from the dark. I screamed back, louder, until he fell silent. Near midnight, with one stone left to set, I heard a low laugh that made my hair stand on end, and then a voice trying hard to sound cheerful. A splendid joke, it said; they would be waiting for him at home. "Let us be gone." Then, in despair: "For the love of God, Montresor!" "Yes," I said, "for the love of God!"

I called his name twice, and the only answer was a jingling of the bells. For a moment I felt a strange heaviness in my chest; the damp air, no doubt. I forced the last stone into place, plastered it, and piled the old bones against the new wall. Fifty years have passed since that night, and nobody has touched those bones. In pace requiescat!