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

There! My proclamation of weakness—at last! But now as the infernal drum of his—nay, its—heart finally grew dimmer and drew to its wretched end, the officers gawked 

in consternation—consternation, or confusion. Why, perhaps, if they had indeed heard that very same noise—that demented, disturbed din—their confusion was over its end. Yes! This must have been it! And yet—I had just now yelled my admittance of crime. Equally possible was that—oh God! And now as those accursed smiles slowly slipped, and slid from their faces; I realized—they had grown very wary. Very wary, indeed—of me! Me! The one who had acted with care and caution! The one who had only acted in defense—in defense and for relief from his gelid eye! The one whose admission had stopped the cacophonous symphony that was tormenting us all! Alas, the fools would not understand—they had only heard my decree, and simply had not seen my reason for fixing the problem of the old man; nor did they know that it was I who stopped that vile heart—I, who was forced to buckle under the encumbrance of the wicked, unearthly heartbeat and momentarily sacrifice my own restraint, even! I was the one to liberate them from it! I was no fiend—no devil! No criminal!  You do not still view me as one, do you? But yet I could see now—I knew they would attempt to immure me, as they would with any common criminal or madman! And now as they began to prowl ever closer, unsheathing their armaments and manacles, encircling me —I knew then that I must show them it. They could not apprehend me—they must not! For I had done nothing wrong! 

“The eye!” I screeched, suddenly and piercingly! That did it— those oafish lawmen stopped and froze as statues, the floor beneath them groaning under the weight of their lies and hypocrisy. “Yes, the eye of the one who I so very cunningly and adroitly have made sightless forever! His eye—the seed of my compulsion! The seed of my labefaction! The seed of all this depravity!” I stooped over to pry open the boards—to expose the cause of my disquietude and prove my justification. And now, as I wrenched the boards open with a grating crunch, I saw it glaring back at me—oh, had you seen it, you would no longer think me mad: For now my blood chilled as though it were ice, as I beheld the horror of that abhorrent orb: the old man’s eye, and the pale, milky film engulfing it! 

“There! Now you must see! The eye—what I did was no crime! You must see now that I was not mad to want, no, need this distress to end! To rid the world of its curse!” 

The officers turned, and stared with incredulity—no doubt shocked at the true horror of the eye, and, and as you must be doing, rethinking their misgivings over my deed! I sneered—I knew I had decidedly convinced them! One could not see his eye, and still believe me to be mad. Indeed, soon after, I felt the cold grip of a heavy hand upon my shoulder—and it would ask me to go with them. Of course! I had no fear: I went willingly, and very hastily! Afterall, they could do nothing, for by now they must not have seen me as free from guilt—no doubt, as well, that I had proved myself as being very much sane—merely a formality of the law, this was! 

“My blamelessness must be upheld—after all,” I now posit directly to you: you, beast behind the pale face and white wig of justice those fools had so expeditiously escorted me to—to the sentinel of law: “it was not I who was in the wrong! Not I, who am no more mad than any other. Not I, whose hand was forced by that evil eye! Now, Hearken! And ponder over how calmly I told my story, and how very smartly I went about doing what I did—and think, ‘could a madman have done all of that?’”