The Tell-Tale Heart from the Point of View of the Police

Its 3:30 a.m., a women pants and rushes within the station. She tells us that during the night she heard a shriek that came from the neighbor’s house and a small ray of light shot out of the window. We asked her if she could corroborate with more but she could not. We thanked her and asked her to lead us to the house... the two officers and I surmised many theories to what might have possibly caused that shriek. We said we would endeavor to search gingerly, not anything slip away.

We walked up to the front door of the house, the porch was clad with dust, I knocked… a man greets us with smiles. Why was he smiling? We tell him that a shriek had been heard by a neighbor during the night; suspicion of foul play had been alerted; information had been derived at the police office, and we had been ordered to search the house. We gingerly walked in to the dark and hunting place. He led us all over the house and told us to search well. He informed us that the old man was out of the country…I rose my eyebrows in disbelief. We did not search in a cursory manner because I was sure that there was something wrong.

We did not find anything out of place. We were about to succumb but just as we went into the old man’s room and the man offered us to sit, I could tell that his tone went from calm and content, to an abrasive one. A grimace crossed his face and became paler by the second, as well as dehydrated; I knew he was hiding something. He swung the chair, he talked louder and louder, his frantic expression was terrifying… I saw him tear the floor boards yelling “here, here!—it is the beating of his hideous heart!” I was electrified of this gruesome site, the old man laying stone dead, with his eyes opened one brown and the other pale blue… just like a vultures eye.