The Tell-Tale Heart (Adapted)

In bold: key vocabulary. Tap any word in the text to see its definition.

Yes, I am nervous. I was nervous then, and I am nervous now. But why do you insist that I am mad? My illness did not dull my senses: it sharpened them, above all my hearing. I could hear every sound in heaven and on earth, and a good many in hell. Judge for yourself, then, how calmly and sanely I can tell you the whole story.

I cannot say when the idea first came to me, but once it had, it haunted me day and night. There was no motive and no passion: I loved the old man who lived in my house, he had never insulted me, and I had no interest in his money. It was his eye. One of them was pale blue, covered with a thin film, and it looked exactly like the eye of a vulture. Whenever it rested on me, my blood ran cold, and so, little by little, I resolved to take his life and be rid of that eye for ever.

You think I am mad, yet a madman plans nothing. You should have watched me work: the meticulous caution, the foresight, the hypocrisy! I was never kinder to the old man than during the week before I killed him. Every night at midnight, I turned the handle of his door and opened it a hand's width, very slowly. Then I slid in a lantern, closed on all sides, so that only a thread of light could escape, and I pushed in my head after it.

For seven nights I found the eye closed, and I could do nothing, since it was not the old man who had wronged me but the eye that tormented me. On the eighth night I moved more slowly than the hand of a clock. Never having felt so sure of my own powers, I could hardly contain my triumph when the old man suddenly stirred in his bed and cried out, "Who's there?"

I did not move. For a full hour, I stayed still as stone, and in all that time I did not hear him lie down again. He sat upright in the dark, listening, exactly as I had listened on so many nights. Then I heard a faint groan, the stifled sound of a soul in mortal terror, and I knew it well, because I had made it myself in the night. After that came another sound, low, quick, and muffled, like a watch wrapped in cotton. It was the old man's heart.

It grew louder and louder. I feared that a neighbor would hear it. With a yell, I threw open the lantern and sprang into the room. He shrieked once. In an instant, I dragged him to the floor and pulled the heavy bed over him. For several minutes, the heart went on beating under the wood, with a dull, muffled sound, and then it stopped. The old man was dead, and I hid him so neatly under the floorboards that no eye, not even his, could have noticed anything.

The police arrived at four, because a neighbor had heard a scream in the night. I smiled, for what had I to fear? I explained that the scream had been my own, in a nightmare, and that the old man was away in the country. I showed them the whole house. I even brought chairs into the room where the body lay, and I set my own chair on the very place. They were satisfied, and they sat down to chat, as if they were old friends.

But soon, my head began to ache, and I felt a ringing in my ears. The ringing became clearer. It was not ringing at all: it was that same low, quick, muffled sound. I talked faster, louder, and the sound grew louder still. I gasped for air, and yet the officers did not seem to hear it. They went on sitting, and chatting, and smiling. Was it possible? Did they hear it? Did they know? Were they secretly enjoying my horror, and laughing at me?