A narrator insists upon his sanity with a vehemence that proves its opposite, describing in meticulous detail how he murdered an old man because of the pale blue film over the old man's eye. Poe published this story in 1843 and compressed into its few pages a nearly unbearable tension between control and disintegration. The narrator is methodical, patient, even proud of his cunning, opening the old man's door a crack each midnight for seven nights. But the heartbeat that rises from beneath the floorboards after the deed is done, growing louder and louder until confession is torn from him, belongs not to the dead but to the living. Guilt has its own acoustics, and in Poe's hands they are deafening.