The Heart of the House

"This house has many hearts." Poltergeist (1982)

The "Tell-Tale Heart" is the drumbeat of the universe. It pounds on and on, in the mind of the presumably insane, but undeniably at least, unreliable and unnamed Narrator, making him remember that God is still there, the Eye of God which fell upon him, in the guise of the eye of the Terrible Old Man, was still scrutinizing him, still appraising him; stripping him bare of all his deceptions, of every ruse. He is a man condemned, held under a microscope. The thumping beating of that heart, in that accursed domicile of murder, is like the pounding down of the Judge's gavel, perhaps presaging the clap of the floorboards of the scaffold. And what, pray tell, sound does the trapdoor make as it swings open, inviting, with the cold, skeletal embracer of Mistress Death, the luckless human fly to stop, stay awhile, in her webbed parlor; stay the night. Stay forever.

Thump, thump, thump...

The condemned must hear the beating of their heart in their doomed skulls, we imagine. In the old film Midnight Express (1978), based on the true story of a man convicted of smuggling drugs, who is sentenced to life in a brutal Turkish prison, we hear the heavy beating of a heart as the protagonist, Billy, is searched by the customs agent at the Turkish airport. We already know they're going to find the hashish he has taped to his body. We hear the beating of his terrified heart. Thump, thump, thump...

The heart is the most important organ of the body. The brain cannot survive without the heart, though it is not generally believed the heart has its own consciousness. The very notion is absurd, you will say. Of course, but I might argue every scintilla, every molecule of your body, like a hologram, is a small representation of the whole. A few locks of hair then, placed on an image of you, and imbued with the power of the Magician, can work deadly miracles.

Thump, thump, thump...

Getting back to it, we do not know why the Narrator cares for the Old Man. His relationship with him is obscure; he may simply be a loyal, if incredibly mad, servant. it is the milk-white EYE of the old man, that cosmic eye floating in space, that God-like orb so terrible and terrifying to the Narrator, that convinces him to snuff out the life of his aged and terrible master. Thus he suffocates him, burying him beneath the floorboards of the house.

Thump, thump, thump...

It is the ticking of the clock. Somewhere, where the Terrible Old Man's Terrible God-like EYE floats in the void, an equally terrible clock is ticking, counting down the moments as the invisible sands of the hourglass run out for Our Humble Narrator, who is perched on the precipice of insanity, who has fallen on one side of the line of demarcation, the border between the Country of the Damned, and our own. (But aren't we all, in the end, doomed, regardless?)

Thump, thump, thump...

Finally, the police, the Agents of Stability, Justice, and Moral Order, those Furies of the One-Eyed Living God, come calling, seeking out The Man Who Is Not There. Where could he have gone to with his terrible, one-eyed gaze? What did he see that so alarmed him?

(In the dark, Our Narrator has described creeping into the Old Man's room, shining a single bullseye on him as he slept. But was he sleeping? Did he ever sleep? Does God ever need to sleep? Does Justice ever sleep? Doesn't Fate inexorably turn the Wheel of Fortune, weigh the scales of Justice, slowly, oh so slowly, but nonetheless, imbuing them with an animate purpose, as a killing technology to return balance and moral...order?)

The Police laugh, making merry at a private joke. The Narrator assumes HE is the butt of that joke, the object of their merriment. He has transgressed heavily, blood, though washed from his hands, stains his soul. Thump, thump, thump, goes the heartbeat of the house, the transliterated body of the Terrible One-Eyed God-Like Dead Man.

It's accursed thump, thump resonates throughout the house. It pounds in the Narrator's ears. it will crack his skull apart. The Policemen, the Furies, are laughing at him, mocking him; all the better, he thinks, to draw him out. They think him a murderous clown. Well, enough of that. He could stand that hideous drumbeat no longer.

They heard!—they suspected!—they knew!—they were making a mockery of my horror!-this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! and now—again!—hark! louder! louder! louder! louder!

“Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed!—tear up the planks! here, here!—It is the beating of his hideous heart!”

The Old Man and his Terrible Eye were the entire consciousness of the Universe, staring into the evil, blighted soul of the NArrator, marked from dint of his orphaned birth by the black tain, the "damned spot" that he could never erase. As to what placed it in his breast, we do not know. He may have simply been born damned into the world, born dead, in the spiritual sense; tho defy the moral order of things. And this, this Black Spot, was what the Od Man spied. And why his cursed heart beat on, and on, and on.

Edgar Allan Poe - The Tell-Tale Heart with subtitles (Read by Christopher Lee)