The Black Cat
By Edgar Allan Poe
I really don’t expect you to believe what I’m about to write. You will probably think I’m mad. But I am not. It’s just that tomorrow I’m going to die, so today, I want to unburden my soul and confess what I have done. What I am about to tell you has terrified and tortured and even destroyed me.
Since I was a young child, everyone knew I was a very gentle and kind person. I was so tenderhearted that my friends used to make fun of me. I loved animals especially. My parents gave me lots of pets. I spent most of my time with these animals. I was never happier than when I was feeding or petting them. Even as I grew into a man, I continued to get much pleasure from being around animals. If you’ve ever had a pet, you understand what I’m talking about. There’s something about loving an animal that goes straight to your heart.
I got married when I was young, and luckily found a wife that loved animals as much as I did. We had birds, goldfish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and … a cat.
This cat was a very large and beautiful animal, completely black, and very smart. My wife often joked about the popular superstition that all black cats are witches in disguise. Not that she was really serious about it. I mentioned it because I just now happened to remember that.
Pluto – this was the cat’s name – was my favorite pet and playmate. I was the one who always fed him, and he followed me wherever I went around the house. It was almost impossible for me to even keep him from following me around in the streets.
Our friendship lasted like this for several years. But during this time (although I’m embarrassed to admit it), I started drinking a lot. The alcohol caused my personality to change for the worse. Every day, I became more irritable and cranky. I didn’t care about other people’s feelings. I yelled at my wife. I even became violent and hurt her at times. Even my pets noticed how I was changing. I began to mistreat them. Except for Pluto – I still controlled myself enough to not hurt him, but I didn’t care about hurting the rabbits, the monkey, or the dog when they came my way. But my disease got worse – alcohol is a terrible disease. It got so bad that finally Pluto started to experience my bad temper.
One night when I came home drunk, I noticed that the cat was avoiding me. I went over and grabbed him. He became scared and bit me with his teeth. The anger of a demon possessed me! It felt as if my soul left my body and the evil of the alcohol made me grab a pocketknife from my coat. I opened it, grabbed the poor animal by the throat, and cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, and I shudder while I’m writing this.
The next morning when I had slept off my drunkenness, I remembered the horrible thing I had done. So I drank more wine to forget the memory of the crime.
As the weeks passed, the cat slowly recovered. The eye socket looked frightening, but he didn’t seem to feel any pain. He went around the house as usual, but, as you can imagine, he would run in terror when he saw me coming. When I wasn’t drinking, I had those old feelings of kindness and love inside me, and it would break my heart to see this animal that used to love me so much, now run from me.
But soon it started to irritate me.
How many times have you done something stupid just because you know it’s wrong? As human beings, we have a strange desire to do things because we know we should not do it. Well, it was for this reason that I ended up doing this: One morning, in cold blood, I slipped a rope around the cat’s neck and hung it to the limb of a tree. I hung it with tears streaming from my eyes and sadness in my heart. I hung it because I knew that it used to love me. I hung it because it had done nothing wrong. I hung it because I knew that I was committing a sin – a deadly sin that would place me out of God’s mercy.
That night after I did this cruel deed, I was awakened in the middle of the night by someone yelling that there was a fire. The curtains in my room were in flames. The whole house was blazing. It was almost impossible for my wife, my servant, and me to escape the fire. The house was completely gone. Everything I owned was burned up. All my wealth, money, and treasures were destroyed in the fire. I had nothing.
The day after the fire, I went back to the house to see what was left. All the walls, except one, had fallen down. The one wall that was left standing was the wall that my bed rested against. For some reason, this wall didn’t catch fire. When I arrived, a large crowd of people were gathered around the wall. The people seemed to be looking at one particular part of the wall and they were saying things like, “Amazing!” and “Strange!” and other similar expressions which made me curious to see what they were talking about. So I went over to the wall and saw on the white surface of the wall, an imprint of a gigantic cat. The impression was marvelous and very detailed. There was even a rope around the animal’s neck.
When I first saw this, I was terrified. But then I started to figure out what probably happened. I remembered that I had hung the cat in the tree next to my bedroom. When the house caught on fire, my yard was filled with a crowd of people. Someone was probably trying to wake me from my sleep, so they cut the rope and threw the animal through my window. The other walls probably pressed the cat into the fresh plaster, making the imprint on the wall.
Although I thought this was probably what happened, it still bothered me and haunted me. For months, I couldn’t stop thinking about the imprint of the cat. During this time, I felt a little bit of guilt for what I had done, and started to miss the cat. When I went to different places around town, I even looked for a cat to replace Pluto.
One night, I sat completely drunk in a tavern in town. Something across the room caught my attention. I noticed a black object on a large piece of furniture. I was surprised that I hadn’t noticed it sooner. I got up, went over to it, and touched it with my hand. It was a black cat – a very large one – the same size as Pluto, and looking exactly like him in every way but one. Pluto was solid black. He didn’t have a single white hair on any part of his body. But this cat had a large splotch of white covering his chest.
When I touched him, he immediately stood up, purred loudly, and rubbed against my hand. He appeared delighted that I came over to him. This was exactly what I had been looking for. At once, I offered to buy him from the landlord, but the owner of the tavern said it wasn’t his. He knew nothing about the cat and had never seen it before.
I continued petting the cat, and when I was about to leave, the animal followed me. I let it follow me down the street, stopping every now and then to pet it. When I got to my house, it made itself at home. My wife loved it.
After a few days, I soon found a dislike arising within me. This is just the opposite of what I thought would happen. I don’t know why, but whenever the animal showed love toward me, it disgusted and annoyed me. Slowly, these feelings of disgust and annoyance turned into hatred. I avoided the animal. Whenever I’d see it, I remembered the cruel thing I had done to Pluto, so I would run away from the cat to keep myself from hurting it. For several weeks, I didn’t hit it or treat it violently. But soon, I grew to hate it.
What made me hate it even more was when I noticed (the day after I brought it home) that, like Pluto, it was also missing one of its eyes. This only made my wife love it more.
The more I avoided the cat, the more it followed me. The more I hated it, the more it seemed to love me. I can’t even describe to you how it wouldn’t leave me alone. Whenever I sat down, it would sit underneath my chair, or jump on my lap, or rub against me. Or if I got up to walk, it would get between my feet and nearly trip me. Or it would fasten its long, sharp claws to my clothes. When it would do these things, I wanted to kill it with a single hit. But I didn’t, partly because of my memory of Pluto, but mainly because I was afraid of the beast.
I wasn’t really afraid that the cat was evil, but I don’t know how else to explain it. Even in this prison cell, I’m almost too ashamed to admit how much I feared the animal. What scared me the most was when one day, my wife pointed out that the white hair around the cat’s chest was changing. Remember how I told you before that the animal had a white blotch of fur? Well, slowly, day by day the fur started changing shape. It was almost unnoticeable. I even tried to tell myself that I was imagining things. But soon, the fur took the shape of something – something I shudder to mention. Very slowly, the white hair around his neck turned into the outline of a rope.
For this reason above all, I hated the animal, and wanted to get rid of the monster.
I wasn’t able to sleep either day or night. In the day, the creature followed me everywhere, and at night I would wake up and find its hot breath on my face as he sat on my chest staring at me.
Under all this pressure, any goodness that was left in me disappeared. Evil thoughts became my best friends – the darkest and most evil thoughts. I soon started to hate all things and all people. I would break out into bursts of anger, and my gentle wife suffered the most from my violence.
One day, she went with me down into the cellar of the old house that we were living in. The cat followed me down the steep stairs and nearly tripped me headfirst down the steps. This sent me into a rage of fury! Forgetting my fear of the animal, I lifted up an axe and aimed it at the cat. If it had landed as I wanted it to, it would have killed the animal instantly, but my wife grabbed my arm and stopped me. This made me even angrier. I pulled my arm away from her and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot without a sound.
With this awful murder accomplished, I had to hide the body. I knew that I couldn’t take it out of the house either day or night without being seen by the neighbors. Many ideas entered my mind. At one point, I thought of cutting the corpse into tiny pieces and destroying them by fire. At another point, I thought about digging a grave for it in the floor of the cellar. Again, I thought about casting it into a well in the yard, or packing it in a box like merchandise and getting a delivery person to take it from the house. Finally, I thought of what I considered to be the best idea of all. I decided to build a wall around it in the cellar.
The cellar was the perfect place for doing this. The walls weren’t very hard and the bricks were loose because it was damp. Even better, one of the walls stuck out a little, made to look like a fake chimney or fireplace. I had no doubt that I could easily remove those bricks, insert the corpse, and replace the wall as before, so that no one would even notice anything suspicious.
With a crowbar, I easily removed the bricks, and carefully deposited the body against the inside wall. Then, after propping up the body in a standing position, I laid the bricks just like they were before. I mixed the mortar and sand very carefully to make a cement mixture that was the same color and texture as the original. When I had finished, I was very satisfied that everything looked right. The wall didn’t look like it had been disturbed at all. I carefully swept up any leftover dirt and sand that was on the floor. I looked around, proud at how well I had hid the body.
My next step was to look for the cat that had caused me to do all this. I had decided to put it to death. If I had been able to find it at that moment, there’s no doubt I would have killed it right then. But it seemed that the intelligent animal had gotten scared because of my violence and had decided to hide from me. I can’t tell you the happiness I felt because of the animal’s disappearance. It didn’t show up during the night, so for the first time since it came home with me, I had a peaceful night’s sleep. Yes, I slept even with the burden of murder on my soul.
The second and third day passed, and still the cat wasn’t around. Again, I felt like a free man. The cat had run away in terror and left the house forever! It was gone for good! I was so happy. The guilt of the murder didn’t bother me much. A few people had asked questions, but I had answered them with no problem. Even a search for my wife had been started, but of course, they found nothing. I knew my future was safe.
Four days after the murder, a group of policemen came unexpectedly to the house and searched my entire house. I felt very confident that they wouldn’t find any clues, and wasn’t embarrassed at all. They officers asked me to go with them around the house as they searched. They inspected every little corner. For the third or fourth time, they returned to the cellar. I didn’t shake a muscle. My heart beat as calmly as an innocent man. I folded my arms and walked calmly. The officers were satisfied and were ready to leave. My excitement at fooling the police was hard to hold back. I wanted to say something – something—just to show them that I was completely innocent.
“Gentlemen,” I said as they were going up the steps. “I’m so glad that I have convinced you that nothing is wrong. I wish you the best. “By the way, gentlemen, this – this is a very well-constructed house.” (In the crazy desire to say something before they left, I hardly knew what I was saying at all!) “I may say, it’s an excellently constructed house. These walls – are you leaving gentlemen? – these walls are solidly put together.”
As I was trying to show off at outsmarting the police, I tapped heavily with a cane that I held in my hand, against the very part of the wall behind which stood the corpse of my wife.
As soon as the echoes of my tapping had stopped, I was answered by a voice within the tomb! There was a cry – quiet at first, like a crying child, the quickly growing into one long, loud, and continuous scream! A howl -- a long shriek like something that would come from the throats of the dead!
I can’t even describe what I was thinking at that moment. My head was spinning, and I staggered to the opposite wall. For one instant, the policemen stood on the stairs, frozen in terror. Then in the next minute, a dozen of their arms were breaking down the wall. When the wall was torn open, the corpse – already greatly decayed and covered with blood and gore – stood standing in front of the officers. Upon her head, with its mouth wide open and with one, single eye of fire, sat the cat that tricked me into murder, and whose informing voice had given away my secret and sentenced me to be hanged.
I had walled up the beast within the tomb.
By Edgar Allan Poe
I really don’t expect you to believe what I’m about to write. You will probably think I’m mad. But I am not. It’s just that tomorrow I’m going to die, so today, I want to unburden my soul and confess what I have done. What I am about to tell you has terrified and tortured and even destroyed me.
Since I was a young child, everyone knew I was a very gentle and kind person. I was so tenderhearted that my friends used to make fun of me. I loved animals especially. My parents gave me lots of pets. I spent most of my time with these animals. I was never happier than when I was feeding or petting them. Even as I grew into a man, I continued to get much pleasure from being around animals. If you’ve ever had a pet, you understand what I’m talking about. There’s something about loving an animal that goes straight to your heart.
I got married when I was young, and luckily found a wife that loved animals as much as I did. We had birds, goldfish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and … a cat.
This cat was a very large and beautiful animal, completely black, and very smart. My wife often joked about the popular superstition that all black cats are witches in disguise. Not that she was really serious about it. I mentioned it because I just now happened to remember that.
Pluto – this was the cat’s name – was my favorite pet and playmate. I was the one who always fed him, and he followed me wherever I went around the house. It was almost impossible for me to even keep him from following me around in the streets.
Our friendship lasted like this for several years. But during this time (although I’m embarrassed to admit it), I started drinking a lot. The alcohol caused my personality to change for the worse. Every day, I became more irritable and cranky. I didn’t care about other people’s feelings. I yelled at my wife. I even became violent and hurt her at times. Even my pets noticed how I was changing. I began to mistreat them. Except for Pluto – I still controlled myself enough to not hurt him, but I didn’t care about hurting the rabbits, the monkey, or the dog when they came my way. But my disease got worse – alcohol is a terrible disease. It got so bad that finally Pluto started to experience my bad temper.
One night when I came home drunk, I noticed that the cat was avoiding me. I went over and grabbed him. He became scared and bit me with his teeth. The anger of a demon possessed me! It felt as if my soul left my body and the evil of the alcohol made me grab a pocketknife from my coat. I opened it, grabbed the poor animal by the throat, and cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, and I shudder while I’m writing this.
The next morning when I had slept off my drunkenness, I remembered the horrible thing I had done. So I drank more wine to forget the memory of the crime.
As the weeks passed, the cat slowly recovered. The eye socket looked frightening, but he didn’t seem to feel any pain. He went around the house as usual, but, as you can imagine, he would run in terror when he saw me coming. When I wasn’t drinking, I had those old feelings of kindness and love inside me, and it would break my heart to see this animal that used to love me so much, now run from me.
But soon it started to irritate me.
How many times have you done something stupid just because you know it’s wrong? As human beings, we have a strange desire to do things because we know we should not do it. Well, it was for this reason that I ended up doing this: One morning, in cold blood, I slipped a rope around the cat’s neck and hung it to the limb of a tree. I hung it with tears streaming from my eyes and sadness in my heart. I hung it because I knew that it used to love me. I hung it because it had done nothing wrong. I hung it because I knew that I was committing a sin – a deadly sin that would place me out of God’s mercy.
That night after I did this cruel deed, I was awakened in the middle of the night by someone yelling that there was a fire. The curtains in my room were in flames. The whole house was blazing. It was almost impossible for my wife, my servant, and me to escape the fire. The house was completely gone. Everything I owned was burned up. All my wealth, money, and treasures were destroyed in the fire. I had nothing.
The day after the fire, I went back to the house to see what was left. All the walls, except one, had fallen down. The one wall that was left standing was the wall that my bed rested against. For some reason, this wall didn’t catch fire. When I arrived, a large crowd of people were gathered around the wall. The people seemed to be looking at one particular part of the wall and they were saying things like, “Amazing!” and “Strange!” and other similar expressions which made me curious to see what they were talking about. So I went over to the wall and saw on the white surface of the wall, an imprint of a gigantic cat. The impression was marvelous and very detailed. There was even a rope around the animal’s neck.
When I first saw this, I was terrified. But then I started to figure out what probably happened. I remembered that I had hung the cat in the tree next to my bedroom. When the house caught on fire, my yard was filled with a crowd of people. Someone was probably trying to wake me from my sleep, so they cut the rope and threw the animal through my window. The other walls probably pressed the cat into the fresh plaster, making the imprint on the wall.
Although I thought this was probably what happened, it still bothered me and haunted me. For months, I couldn’t stop thinking about the imprint of the cat. During this time, I felt a little bit of guilt for what I had done, and started to miss the cat. When I went to different places around town, I even looked for a cat to replace Pluto.
One night, I sat completely drunk in a tavern in town. Something across the room caught my attention. I noticed a black object on a large piece of furniture. I was surprised that I hadn’t noticed it sooner. I got up, went over to it, and touched it with my hand. It was a black cat – a very large one – the same size as Pluto, and looking exactly like him in every way but one. Pluto was solid black. He didn’t have a single white hair on any part of his body. But this cat had a large splotch of white covering his chest.
When I touched him, he immediately stood up, purred loudly, and rubbed against my hand. He appeared delighted that I came over to him. This was exactly what I had been looking for. At once, I offered to buy him from the landlord, but the owner of the tavern said it wasn’t his. He knew nothing about the cat and had never seen it before.
I continued petting the cat, and when I was about to leave, the animal followed me. I let it follow me down the street, stopping every now and then to pet it. When I got to my house, it made itself at home. My wife loved it.
After a few days, I soon found a dislike arising within me. This is just the opposite of what I thought would happen. I don’t know why, but whenever the animal showed love toward me, it disgusted and annoyed me. Slowly, these feelings of disgust and annoyance turned into hatred. I avoided the animal. Whenever I’d see it, I remembered the cruel thing I had done to Pluto, so I would run away from the cat to keep myself from hurting it. For several weeks, I didn’t hit it or treat it violently. But soon, I grew to hate it.
What made me hate it even more was when I noticed (the day after I brought it home) that, like Pluto, it was also missing one of its eyes. This only made my wife love it more.
The more I avoided the cat, the more it followed me. The more I hated it, the more it seemed to love me. I can’t even describe to you how it wouldn’t leave me alone. Whenever I sat down, it would sit underneath my chair, or jump on my lap, or rub against me. Or if I got up to walk, it would get between my feet and nearly trip me. Or it would fasten its long, sharp claws to my clothes. When it would do these things, I wanted to kill it with a single hit. But I didn’t, partly because of my memory of Pluto, but mainly because I was afraid of the beast.
I wasn’t really afraid that the cat was evil, but I don’t know how else to explain it. Even in this prison cell, I’m almost too ashamed to admit how much I feared the animal. What scared me the most was when one day, my wife pointed out that the white hair around the cat’s chest was changing. Remember how I told you before that the animal had a white blotch of fur? Well, slowly, day by day the fur started changing shape. It was almost unnoticeable. I even tried to tell myself that I was imagining things. But soon, the fur took the shape of something – something I shudder to mention. Very slowly, the white hair around his neck turned into the outline of a rope.
For this reason above all, I hated the animal, and wanted to get rid of the monster.
I wasn’t able to sleep either day or night. In the day, the creature followed me everywhere, and at night I would wake up and find its hot breath on my face as he sat on my chest staring at me.
Under all this pressure, any goodness that was left in me disappeared. Evil thoughts became my best friends – the darkest and most evil thoughts. I soon started to hate all things and all people. I would break out into bursts of anger, and my gentle wife suffered the most from my violence.
One day, she went with me down into the cellar of the old house that we were living in. The cat followed me down the steep stairs and nearly tripped me headfirst down the steps. This sent me into a rage of fury! Forgetting my fear of the animal, I lifted up an axe and aimed it at the cat. If it had landed as I wanted it to, it would have killed the animal instantly, but my wife grabbed my arm and stopped me. This made me even angrier. I pulled my arm away from her and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot without a sound.
With this awful murder accomplished, I had to hide the body. I knew that I couldn’t take it out of the house either day or night without being seen by the neighbors. Many ideas entered my mind. At one point, I thought of cutting the corpse into tiny pieces and destroying them by fire. At another point, I thought about digging a grave for it in the floor of the cellar. Again, I thought about casting it into a well in the yard, or packing it in a box like merchandise and getting a delivery person to take it from the house. Finally, I thought of what I considered to be the best idea of all. I decided to build a wall around it in the cellar.
The cellar was the perfect place for doing this. The walls weren’t very hard and the bricks were loose because it was damp. Even better, one of the walls stuck out a little, made to look like a fake chimney or fireplace. I had no doubt that I could easily remove those bricks, insert the corpse, and replace the wall as before, so that no one would even notice anything suspicious.
With a crowbar, I easily removed the bricks, and carefully deposited the body against the inside wall. Then, after propping up the body in a standing position, I laid the bricks just like they were before. I mixed the mortar and sand very carefully to make a cement mixture that was the same color and texture as the original. When I had finished, I was very satisfied that everything looked right. The wall didn’t look like it had been disturbed at all. I carefully swept up any leftover dirt and sand that was on the floor. I looked around, proud at how well I had hid the body.
My next step was to look for the cat that had caused me to do all this. I had decided to put it to death. If I had been able to find it at that moment, there’s no doubt I would have killed it right then. But it seemed that the intelligent animal had gotten scared because of my violence and had decided to hide from me. I can’t tell you the happiness I felt because of the animal’s disappearance. It didn’t show up during the night, so for the first time since it came home with me, I had a peaceful night’s sleep. Yes, I slept even with the burden of murder on my soul.
The second and third day passed, and still the cat wasn’t around. Again, I felt like a free man. The cat had run away in terror and left the house forever! It was gone for good! I was so happy. The guilt of the murder didn’t bother me much. A few people had asked questions, but I had answered them with no problem. Even a search for my wife had been started, but of course, they found nothing. I knew my future was safe.
Four days after the murder, a group of policemen came unexpectedly to the house and searched my entire house. I felt very confident that they wouldn’t find any clues, and wasn’t embarrassed at all. They officers asked me to go with them around the house as they searched. They inspected every little corner. For the third or fourth time, they returned to the cellar. I didn’t shake a muscle. My heart beat as calmly as an innocent man. I folded my arms and walked calmly. The officers were satisfied and were ready to leave. My excitement at fooling the police was hard to hold back. I wanted to say something – something—just to show them that I was completely innocent.
“Gentlemen,” I said as they were going up the steps. “I’m so glad that I have convinced you that nothing is wrong. I wish you the best. “By the way, gentlemen, this – this is a very well-constructed house.” (In the crazy desire to say something before they left, I hardly knew what I was saying at all!) “I may say, it’s an excellently constructed house. These walls – are you leaving gentlemen? – these walls are solidly put together.”
As I was trying to show off at outsmarting the police, I tapped heavily with a cane that I held in my hand, against the very part of the wall behind which stood the corpse of my wife.
As soon as the echoes of my tapping had stopped, I was answered by a voice within the tomb! There was a cry – quiet at first, like a crying child, the quickly growing into one long, loud, and continuous scream! A howl -- a long shriek like something that would come from the throats of the dead!
I can’t even describe what I was thinking at that moment. My head was spinning, and I staggered to the opposite wall. For one instant, the policemen stood on the stairs, frozen in terror. Then in the next minute, a dozen of their arms were breaking down the wall. When the wall was torn open, the corpse – already greatly decayed and covered with blood and gore – stood standing in front of the officers. Upon her head, with its mouth wide open and with one, single eye of fire, sat the cat that tricked me into murder, and whose informing voice had given away my secret and sentenced me to be hanged.
I had walled up the beast within the tomb.
