Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Mad indeed would I be
to expect or solicit belief
for the most wild narrative
which I am about to tell.
Yet mad am I not-and surely do I not dream.
My purpose is to place before the world a series
of mere household events.
In their consequences,
these events have terrified-
have tortured-
have destroyed me.
From my infancy
I was especially fond of animals.
There is something in the unselfish
and self-sacrificing love of a dog,
which goes directly to the heart of him
who has had frequent occasion
to test the paltry friendship
and gossamer fidelity of mere "Man".
I married early.
We had birds, goldfish, a fine dog,
rabbits, a small monkey,
and a cat.
The latter was a remarkably large and beautiful animal,
entirely black.
Pluto-this was the cat's name-
was my favorite pet and playmate.
For several years my general temperament
had experienced a radical alteration for the worse.
I even offered my wife personal violence.
However, I still retained sufficient regard for Pluto
to restrain me from maltreating him.
But my disease grew upon me-
for what disease is like Alcohol!
-and at length even Pluto began to experience the effects of my ill temper.
One night, returning home, much intoxicated,
I fancied that the cat avoided my presence.
I seized him;
he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth.
The fury of a demon instantly possessed me.
I knew myself no longer.
My soul seemed, at once to take its flight from my body.
I took my penknife,
grasped the poor beast by the throat,
and deliberately cut one of its eyes from its socket!
I blush, I burn, I shudder,
while I tell the damnable atrocity.
The cat slowly recovered.
The socket of the lost eye presented a frightful appearance,
but he no longer appeared to suffer any pain.
And then came,
as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow,
the spirit of perverseness.
Of this spirit philosophy takes no account.
Who has not found himself committing a vile or stupid action,
for no other reason than because he knows he should not?
One morning, in cold blood,
I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree;
-hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes;
-hung it because I knew that it had loved me,
and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence;
-hung it because I knew that in so doing
I was committing a sin.
That night I was aroused from sleep by the cry of fire.
The whole house was blazing.
It was with great difficulty that my wife, and myself,
made our escape from the conflagration.
My entire worldly wealth was swallowed up,
and I resigned myself to despair.
On the day succeeding the fire,
I visited the ruins.
The walls with one exception had fallen in.
About this wall a dense crowd were collected.
The words, "strange!"
"singular!"
and other similar expressions, excited my curiosity.
I saw as if graven in bas-relief upon the white surface,
the figure of a gigantic cat.
There was a rope about the animal's neck.
It did not fail to make a deep impression upon my fancy.
I went so far as to regret the loss of the animal,
and to look about me for another pet of the same species,
and of somewhat similar appearance.
One night as I sat, half stupefied,
in a den of more than infamy,
my attention was suddenly caught drawn to some black object.
It was a black cat-
fully as large as Pluto,
and closely resembling him in every respect but one.
Pluto had not a white hair upon any portion of his body;
but this cat had a large, although indefinite splotch of white,
covering nearly the whole region of the breast.
Upon my touching him,
he immediately arose, purred loudly,
and rubbed against my hand.
When I prepared to go home,
the animal evinced a disposition to accompany me.
When it reached the house
it domesticated itself at once,
and became immediately a great favorite with my wife.
For my own part, I soon found a dislike to it arising within me.
By slow degrees these feelings of disgust and annoyance
rose into the bitterness of hatred.
Gradually-very gradually-
I came to look upon it with unutterable loathing,
and to flee silently from its odious presence,
as from the breath of a pestilence.
What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the beast,
was the discovery that, like Pluto,
it also had been deprived of one of its eyes.
With my aversion to this cat, however,
its partiality for myself seemed to increase.
It covered me with its loathsome caresses.
At such times, although I longed to destroy it with a blow,
I was yet withheld from so doing,
partly by a memory of my former crime,
but chiefly because I absolutely dreaded the beast.
I am almost ashamed to own-
that the terror and horror with which the animal inspired me,
had been heightened by one of the merest possible chimeras.
The white mark had been originally very indefinite;
but by nearly imperceptible degrees, it had, at length,
assumed a rigorous distinctness of outline.
It was now the representation of an object that I shudder to name-
it was now the image of a hideous-
of a ghastly thing-
of the GALLOWS!
-oh mournful symbol of Horror and of Crime-
of Agony and of Death!
Evil thoughts became my sole intimates.
The moodiness of my usual temper
increased to hatred of all things and of all mankind;
my uncomplaining wife, alas,
was the most usual and the most patient of sufferers.
One day she accompanied me, upon some household errand,
into the cellar of the old building which our poverty compelled us to inhabit.
The cat followed me down the steep stairs,
and, nearly throwing me head long,
exasperated me to madness.
Uplifting an ax,
I aimed a blow at the animal.
But this blow was arrested by the hand of my wife.
Goaded by the interference into a rage,
I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the ax in her brain.
She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan.
This hideous *** accomplished,
I set myself to the task of concealing the body.
I determined to wall it up in the cellar,
as the monks of the Middle Ages
are recorded to have walled up their victims.
For a purpose such as this the cellar was well adapted.
I made no doubt that I could readily displace the bricks in one wall,
insert the corpse and wall the whole up as before,
so that no eye could detect anything suspicious.
When I had finished,
my next step was to look for the beast
which had been the cause of so much wretchedness;
for I had firmly resolved to put it to death.
But it appeared that the crafty animal forbore to present itself.
It is impossible to describe or to imagine the deep,
the blissful sense of relief
the absence of the detested creature occasioned.
For one night
I soundly and tranquilly slept;
yes, slept, even with the burden of *** upon my soul.
Upon the fourth day of the assassination,
a party of the police came, very unexpectedly,
into the house and proceeded to make
a rigorous investigation of the premises.
Secure, however, in the inscrutability of my place of concealment,
I felt no embarrassment whatever.
At length, they descended into the cellar.
My heart beat calmly.
The police were thoroughly satisfied and prepared to depart.
I burned to say if but one word,
by way of triumph,
and to render doubly sure
their assurance of my guiltlessness.
"Gentlemen," I said at last,
as the party ascended the steps,
"I delight to have allayed your suspicions.
By the bye, gentlemen, this-
this is a well-constructed house,
I may say an excellently well-constructed house.
These walls-
are you going gentlemen?
-these walls are solidly put together;"
and here, through the mere frenzy of bravado,
I rapped heavily with a cane upon that very portion of the brick-work
behind which stood the corpse of my wife.
No sooner had the reverberation of my blows sunk into silence,
than I was answered by a voice from within the tomb!
-by a cry at first muffled and broken,
like the sobbing of a child,
and quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream,
utterly inhuman-a howl-a wailing shriek,
half of horror and half of triumph,
such as might have arisen only out of hell
from the throats of the damned in their agony
and of the demons that exult in that damnation.
Swooning, I staggered to the opposite wall.
In the next instant a dozen stout arms
were toiling at the wall.
It fell bodily.
The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore,
stood erect before the eyes of the spectators.
Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire,
sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me to ***,
and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman.
I had walled the monster up within the tomb!
Larry Bell: The Black Cat March 15, 2012 Old South Church in Boston Sam Ou, cello Steve McConnell, narrator Larry Bell, piano