The story is told from the point of view of the murderer, who is a lodger at the home of a kind, elderly man. However, the narrator soon believes that one of the man’s eyes is evil, and resembles an eye of a vulture. Due to this belief, the narrator decides to kill the old man, although the man had never wronged the narrator. The man tries to convince us that he is not mad because he planned the murder so thoroughly and carefully, but he only succeeds in further proving his insanity. For a week before the murder, the narrator is the kindest he’s ever been to the old man, and, each night, around midnight, the narrator would very slowly poke his head into the old man’s room and shine a tiny ray of light onto the man’s evil eye. He could not bring himself to murder the old man, however, as the eye was always closed.
But on the eighth night, while entering the room, the narrator accidently wakes up the old man. Still edging slowly into the room, not giving up, the narrator finally kills the old man, who lets out a single cry. The narrator leaves no trace of the crime, dismembering the body from its head, arms and legs, and hides the old man’s body underneath the floorboards of the bedroom, which proves a wise precaution as three policemen were sent to investigate a scream heard from the house. The narrator invites them to search all over the house, telling them that the old man was out of the town at the moment and that the scream heard was his own, when waking up from a nightmare.
The narrator, after successfully lifting any suspicion off him, as all seems in order and the narrator has a pleasant and calm nature, not one of a typical murderer, invites the policemen to stay a while and to have a rest, and they all talk in the old man’s room, with the narrator sitting above the body. They accept and all seems to be going well, however, the narrator soon starts to hear a repeating sound coming from somewhere close to him, although the policemen seem to not hear it....