Summary of The Tell-Tale Heart

The story starts with a man, who is the narrator, that is insisting that he's not crazy.
Then he starts to explain how he had to kill his neighbour because of the evil eye he
had, which made him feel stressed. Each night for a week, he would slowly open the
door to the old man's apartment and look in on him sleeping. He wouldn't kill the old
man unless he saw his vulture-eye.

On the eighth night, when he was watching the old man at midnight, the narrator was
confused because of the old man’s strange behaviour, and maybe the old man heard
him because he was awake. The old man asked if anyone was there and the narrator
stood still at the door. After waiting a long while, he decided to open the lantern a tiny
bit, and a single ray fell upon the old man's eye. The narrator could hear the old man's
heart beating in fear. The beating became louder until the narrator feared the
neighbors would hear it, so he decided to attack the old man pulling him to the floor
and pulling the bed on top of him. The old man screamed very loudly and the narrator
feared that the neighbours would hear it. He waited until the beating of the old man’s
heart stopped, then pulled off the bed and found the old man stone dead.

After that, the narrator decided to dismember the body and to hide it under the
floorboards. Very early in the morning, a knock came at the narrator’s door, and he
found three policemen who had been called due to a strange scream overheard by
some neighbors wondering if he was involded on it. The narrator calmly invited the
policemen inside and encouraged them to search the place. He explained that the old
man was off in the country, and that he was the one who had screamed due to a bad
dream.

As they were talking, the narrator began to hear a noise coming from the floorboards.
He recognized it as the beating heart of the old man. He tried to talk louder to cover it
up and wondered if the policemen could hear it too. He knew they must hear it, and
they had to suspect what he had done. Finally, he couldn't bear it anymore and told
them that the old man’s body was under the floorboards.