[English Story] The Black Cat

For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am
about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad
indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very
senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not -
and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and
to-day I would unburthen my soul. My immediate
purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly,
and without comment, a series of mere household
events. In their consequences, these events have
terrified - have tortured - have destroyed me. Yet I will
not attempt to expound them. To me, they have
presented little but Horror - to many they will seem less
terrible than barroques . Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect
may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the
common-place - some intellect more calm, more logical,
and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive,
in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than
an ordinary succession of very natural causes and
effects.
From my infancy I was noted for the docility and
humanity of my disposition. My tenderness of heart was
even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my
companions. I was especially fond of animals, and was
indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets. With
these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy
as when feeding and caressing them. This peculiarity of
character grew with my growth, and in my manhood, I
derived from it one of my principal sources of pleasure.
To those who have cherished an affection for a faithful
and sagacious dog, I need hardly be at the trouble of
explaining the nature or the intensity of the gratification
thus derivable. There is something in the unselfish and
self-sacrificing love of a brute, 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, and was happy to find in my wife a
disposition not uncongenial with my own. Observing my
partiality for domestic pets, she lost no opportunity of
procuring those of the most agreeable kind. We had
birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and
a cat.
This latter was a remarkably large and beautiful animal,
entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree. In
speaking of his intelligence, my wife, who at heart was
not a little tinctured with superstition, made frequent
allusion to the ancient popular notion, which regarded all
black cats as witches in disguise. Not that she was ever
serious upon this point - and I mention the matter at all
for no better reason than that it happens, just now, to be
remembered.
Pluto - this was the cat's name - was my favorite pet and
playmate. I alone fed him, and he attended me wherever
I went about the house. It was even with difficulty that I
could prevent him from following me through the
streets.
Our friendship lasted, in this manner, for several years,
during which my general temperament and character -
through the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance -
had (I blush to confess it) experienced a radical
alteration for the worse. I grew, day by day, more
moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of
others. I suffered myself to use intemperate language to
my wife. At length, I even offered her personal violence.
My pets, of course, were made to feel the change in my
disposition. I not only neglected, but ill-used them. For
Pluto, however, I still retained sufficient regard to
restrain me from maltreating him, as I made no scruple
of maltreating the rabbits, the monkey, or even the dog,
when by accident, or through affection, they came in my
way. But my disease grew upon me - for what disease is
like Alcohol! - and at length even Pluto, who was now
becoming old, and consequently somewhat peevish -
even Pluto began to experience the effects of my ill
temper.
One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one
of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided
my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at my
violence, 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 original soul seemed, at
once, to take its flight from my body and a more than
fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of
my frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife,
opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and
deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I
burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity.
When reason returned with the morning - when I had
slept off the fumes of the night's debauch - I
experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse,
for the crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at
best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul
remained untouched. I again plunged into excess, and
soon drowned in wine all memory of the deed.
In the meantime the cat slowly recovered. The socket of
the lost eye presented, it is true, a frightful appearance,
but he no longer appeared to suffer any pain. He went
about the house as usual, but, as might be expected,
fled in extreme terror at my approach. I had so much of
my old heart left, as to be at first grieved by this evident
dislike on the part of a creature which had once so loved
me. But this feeling soon gave place to irritation. And
then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow,
the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy
takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul
lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive
impulses of the human heart - one of the indivisible
primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to
the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times,
found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no
other reason than because he knows he should not?
Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our
best judgment, to violate that which is Law , merely
because we understand it to be such? This spirit of
perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was
this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself - to
offer violence to its own nature - to do wrong for the
wrong's sake only - that urged me to continue and finally
to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the
unoffending brute. One morning, in cool 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, and
with the bitterest remorse at my heart; - 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 - a deadly sin that would
so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it - if such a
thing wore possible - even beyond the reach of the
infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible
God.
On the night of the day on which this cruel deed was
done, I was aroused from sleep by the cry of fire. The
curtains of my bed were in flames. The whole house was
blazing. It was with great difficulty that my wife, a
servant, and myself, made our escape from the
conflagration. The destruction was complete. My entire
worldly wealth was swallowed up, and I resigned myself
thenceforward to despair.
I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a
sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and
the atrocity. But I am detailing a chain of facts - and wish
not to leave even a possible link imperfect. On the day
succeeding the fire, I visited the ruins. The walls, with
one exception, had fallen in. This exception was found in
a compartment wall, not very thick, which stood about
the middle of the house, and against which had rested
the head of my bed. The plastering had here, in great
measure, resisted the action of the fire - a fact which I
attributed to its having been recently spread. About this
wall a dense crowd were collected, and many persons
seemed to be examining a particular portion of it with
very minute and eager attention. The words "strange!"
"singular!" and other similar expressions, excited my
curiosity. I approached and saw, as if graven in bas relief
upon the white surface, the figure of a gigantic cat. The
impression was given with an accuracy truly marvellous.
There was a rope about the animal's neck.
When I first beheld this apparition - for I could scarcely
regard it as less - my wonder and my terror were
extreme. But at length reflection came to my aid. The
cat, I remembered, had been hung in a garden adjacent
to the house. Upon the alarm of fire, this garden had
been immediately filled by the crowd - by some one of
whom the animal must have been cut from the tree and
thrown, through an open window, into my chamber. This
had probably been done with the view of arousing me
from sleep. The falling of other walls had compressed
the victim of my cruelty into the substance of the
freshly-spread plaster; the lime of which, with the flames,
and the ammonia from the carcass, had then
accomplished the portraiture as I saw it.
Although I thus readily accounted to my reason, if not
altogether to my conscience, for the startling fact just
detailed, it did not the less fail to make a deep
impression upon my fancy. For months I could not rid
myself of the phantasm of the cat; and, during this
period, there came back into my spirit a half-sentiment
that seemed, but was not, remorse. I went so far as to
regret the loss of the animal, and to look about me,
among the vile haunts which I now habitually frequented,
for another pet of the same species, and of somewhat
similar appearance, with which to supply its place.
One night as I sat, half stupified, in a den of more than
infamy, my attention was suddenly drawn to some black
object, reposing upon the head of one of the immense
hogsheads of Gin, or of Rum, which constituted the
chief furniture of the apartment. I had been looking
steadily at the top of this hogshead for some minutes,
and what now caused me surprise was the fact that I
had not sooner perceived the object thereupon. I
approached it, and touched it with my hand. It was a
black cat - a very large one - 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,
rubbed against my hand, and appeared delighted with
my notice. This, then, was the very creature of which I
was in search. I at once offered to purchase it of the
landlord; but this person made no claim to it - knew
nothing of it - had never seen it before.
I continued my caresses, and, when I prepared to go
home, the animal evinced a disposition to accompany
me. I permitted it to do so; occasionally stooping and
patting it as I proceeded. 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. This was just the reverse of what I had
anticipated; but - I know not how or why it was - its
evident fondness for myself rather disgusted and
annoyed. By slow degrees, these feelings of disgust and
annoyance rose into the bitterness of hatred. I avoided
the creature; a certain sense of shame, and the
remembrance of my former deed of cruelty, preventing
me from physically abusing it. I did not, for some weeks,
strike, or otherwise violently ill use it; but 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, on the morning after I brought it home,
that, like Pluto, it also had been deprived of one of its
eyes. This circumstance, however, only endeared it to
my wife, who, as I have already said, possessed, in a
high degree, that humanity of feeling which had once
been my distinguishing trait, and the source of many of
my simplest and purest pleasures.
With my aversion to this cat, however, its partiality for
myself seemed to increase. It followed my footsteps with
a pertinacity which it would be difficult to make the
reader comprehend. Whenever I sat, it would crouch
beneath my chair, or spring upon my knees, covering me
with its loathsome caresses. If I arose to walk it would
get between my feet and thus nearly throw me down, or,
fastening its long and sharp claws in my dress, clamber,
in this manner, to my breast. 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 - let me confess it at once - by absolute dread of
the beast.
This dread was not exactly a dread of physical evil - and
yet I should be at a loss how otherwise to define it. I am
almost ashamed to own - yes, even in this felon's cell, 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 chimaeras it would be possible to
conceive. My wife had called my attention, more than
once, to the character of the mark of white hair, of
which I have spoken, and which constituted the sole
visible difference between the strange beast and the one
I had destroyed. The reader will remember that this mark,
although large, had been originally very indefinite; but,
by slow degrees - degrees nearly imperceptible, and
which for a long time my Reason struggled to reject as
fanciful - it had, at length, assumed a rigorous
distinctness of outline. It was now the representation of
an object that I shudder to name - and for this, above
all, I loathed, and dreaded, and would have rid myself of
the monster had I dared - it was now, I say, the image of
a hideous - of a ghastly thing - of the GALLOWS! - oh,
mournful and terrible engine of Horror and of Crime - of
Agony and of Death!
And now was I indeed wretched beyond the
wretchedness of mere Humanity. And a brute beast -
whose fellow I had contemptuously destroyed - a brute
beast to work out for me - for me a man, fashioned in the
image of the High God - so much of insufferable wo!
Alas! neither by day nor by night knew I the blessing of
Rest any more! During the former the creature left me no
moment alone; and, in the latter, I started, hourly, from
dreams of unutterable fear, to find the hot breath of the
thing upon my face, and its vast weight - an incarnate
Night-Mare that I had no power to shake off - incumbent
eternally upon my heart!
Beneath the pressure of torments such as these, the
feeble remnant of the good within me succumbed. Evil
thoughts became my sole intimates - the darkest and
most evil of thoughts. The moodiness of my usual
temper increased to hatred of all things and of all
mankind; while, from the sudden, frequent, and
ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I now blindly
abandoned myself, 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
headlong, exasperated me to madness. Uplifting an axe,
and forgetting, in my wrath, the childish dread which had
hitherto stayed my hand, I aimed a blow at the animal
which, of course, would have proved instantly fatal had
it descended as I wished. But this blow was arrested by
the hand of my wife. Goaded, by the interference, into a
rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my arm from her
grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon
the spot, without a groan.
This hideous murder accomplished, I set myself
forthwith, and with entire deliberation, to the task of
concealing the body. I knew that I could not remove it
from the house, either by day or by night, without the
risk of being observed by the neighbors. Many projects
entered my mind. At one period I thought of cutting the
corpse into minute fragments, and destroying them by
fire. At another, I resolved to dig a grave for it in the
floor of the cellar. Again, I deliberated about casting it in
the well in the yard - about packing it in a box, as if
merchandize, with the usual arrangements, and so
getting a porter to take it from the house. Finally I hit
upon what I considered a far better expedient than either
of these. 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.
Its walls were loosely constructed, and had lately been
plastered throughout with a rough plaster, which the
dampness of the atmosphere had prevented from
hardening. Moreover, in one of the walls was a
projection, caused by a false chimney, or fireplace, that
had been filled up, and made to resemble the red of the
cellar. I made no doubt that I could readily displace the
bricks at this point, insert the corpse, and wall the whole
up as before, so that no eye could detect any thing
suspicious. And in this calculation I was not deceived. By
means of a crow-bar I easily dislodged the bricks, and,
having carefully deposited the body against the inner
wall, I propped it in that position, while, with little
trouble, I re-laid the whole structure as it originally stood.
Having procured mortar, sand, and hair, with every
possible precaution, I prepared a plaster which could not
be distinguished from the old, and with this I very
carefully went over the new brickwork. When I had
finished, I felt satisfied that all was right. The wall did not
present the slightest appearance of having been
disturbed. The rubbish on the floor was picked up with
the minutest care. I looked around triumphantly, and
said to myself - "Here at least, then, my labor has not
been in vain."
My next step was to look for the beast which had been
the cause of so much wretchedness; for I had, at length,
firmly resolved to put it to death. Had I been able to meet
with it, at the moment, there could have been no doubt
of its fate; but it appeared that the crafty animal had
been alarmed at the violence of my previous anger, and
forebore to present itself in my present mood. It is
impossible to describe, or to imagine, the deep, the
blissful sense of relief which the absence of the detested
creature occasioned in my bosom. It did not make its
appearance during the night - and thus for one night at
least, since its introduction into the house, I soundly and
tranquilly slept; aye, slept even with the burden of
murder upon my soul!
The second and the third day passed, and still my
tormentor came not. Once again I breathed as a freeman.
The monster, in terror, had fled the premises forever! I
should behold it no more! My happiness was supreme!
The guilt of my dark deed disturbed me but little. Some
few inquiries had been made, but these had been readily
answered. Even a search had been instituted - but of
course nothing was to be discovered. I looked upon my
future felicity as secured.
Upon the fourth day of the assassination, a party of the
police came, very unexpectedly, into the house, and
proceeded again to make rigorous investigation of the
premises. Secure, however, in the inscrutability of my
place of concealment, I felt no embarrassment whatever.
The officers bade me accompany them in their search.
They left no nook or corner unexplored. At length, for
the third or fourth time, they descended into the cellar. I
quivered not in a muscle. My heart beat calmly as that of
one who slumbers in innocence. I walked the cellar from
end to end. I folded my arms upon my bosom, and
roamed easily to and fro. The police were thoroughly
satisfied and prepared to depart. The glee at my heart
was too strong to be restrained. 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. I wish
you all health, and a little more courtesy. By the bye,
gentlemen, this - this is a very well constructed
house." [In the rabid desire to say something easily, I
scarcely knew what I uttered at all.] - "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 phrenzy of bravado, I rapped
heavily, with a cane which I held in my hand, upon that
very portion of the brick-work behind which stood the
corpse of the wife of my bosom.
But may God shield and deliver me from the fangs of the
Arch-Fiend! 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 then quickly
swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream,
utterly anomalous and inhuman - a howl - a wailing
shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might
have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats
of the dammed in their agony and of the demons that
exult in the damnation.
Of my own thoughts it is folly to speak. Swooning, I
staggered to the opposite wall. For one instant the party
upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity
of terror and of awe. In the next, 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 into murder, and
whose informing voice had consigned me to the
hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb!