Hi I'd like to thank you for reading my first story, I did it as a school assignment a little while back and my teacher gave me 5 extra points just because he liked it, so I figured, why not?
Please comment, all reviews are appriceated since I'm still new.
'Tell-Tale Heart' Rewrite
It was one of the darkest, quietest nights the girl could remember. She didn't know why she had just woken up in the middle of the night until she realized that her throat was so dry she was sure there were cracks inside. She was wrestling her way out of her sea of blankets when she noticed a light in the window of the house next door to hers. 'That can't be right' she thought. The man who lived in that house was far too old to be up that late, and the only other resident in that house was another man somewhere in his thirties. Who, as the girl thought, must've been dropped on his head when he was a baby.
Still curious as to what her elderly neighbor could be doing this late at night, the girl swung herself around and planted her bare feet on the wooden floorboards. She then stood up on her still-asleep legs and tugged the rest of her long white nightgown as she tiptoed over to the windowsill, being careful not to wake her parents on the floor below. She cautiously crouched down to her knees and squinted in an attempt to see inside the room of the house. After a few minutes she was just about to head downstairs to get a drink of water and forget she ever saw anything when suddenly, it happened.
It lasted only an instant, but to the girl it seemed to happen in slow motion. In less than a minute, she heard a loud yell as she saw a dark figure that was apparently carrying the lantern she saw. As the figure rushed towards the bed stand, she heard another yell, a weaker one that seemed to cut off as the figure flipped the bed over another that had apparently been sitting up in the bed. Within moments the figure in the bed was underneath it and was no longer moving.
The girl instantly felt her face whiten, her eyes widen, and her pupils shrink (or enlarge, she couldn't tell), as the scene unfolded before. She didn't know why she didn't instantly bolt downstairs, shake her parents awake and scream at them to call the police in a panic. Perhaps it was shock, but she didn't know, she just sat there frozen as the figure slowly got to its feet and began to turn the bed over. The figure's face came into the light, and then it hit her.
She had always known that the younger man was somewhat weird but she never would've considered him a murderer. 'He's even more insane than I thought' the girl thought fearfully. As soon as the bed was right side up, the man did an unusual thing. He stood up, and walked calmly out of the room. At first she thought he was just going back to sleep, which would've meant that he needed more help than she thought. But a moment later, he came back into the room, carrying a hatchet. Thankfully, the light was still very dim in the room so she couldn't see what the old man's body looked like as the younger man swung the hatchet down. 'What is this lunatic doing?' the girl thought, extremely confused. She was only about 13, but even she knew that when you kill somebody, the last thing you should do is create more evidence by spilling all of the blood onto the floor.
After the young man finished slicing the body into about eight or ten pieces, the girl could just barely make out him doing something that made her eyebrows raise so high, she was sure they would fly off her face. He actually discarded the floorboards and carefully placed each piece in the newly-formed hole before putting the boards back into place. 'Why would you do that!' the girl thought, flabbergasted by the man's concealing technique, she found it both messy and a waste of energy.
For about another hour, she sat there with her mouth hanging wide open, watching the man clean up the floor on the floor 'til not a drop could be seen (which was weird because wood floors usually absorb liquid and stain very easily). Finally she finally came to her senses, and rushed downstairs to call the police, still being careful not to wake her parents since she didn't want them to worry.
A little while later, the girl was washed, dressed, and sitting by her windowsill once again, waiting for the police to arrive. As strange a s it seemed, the girl felt that it was her duty as a witness to make sure that the man was arrested for murder. It seemed forever before two police officers appeared at the front door of the house. The girl thought 'seriously, a person calls and reports a murder and they only send two officers over to investigate! What is the world coming to?' She figured that the department just simply hadn't taken her call seriously because of her young age and figured she had just had a nightmare and sent the officers over to put her at ease.
Strangely enough, the man didn't act nervous at all at the sight of the policemen, he personally invited them and allowed them to search the house. The girl thought, even more shocked than before, 'dude, they're police officers! You're busted!' But still the man acted very casually, like what she had seen him do before dawn had never happened. Then she saw them appear in the old man's room, she also saw him offer the officers a seat, and the young man plant his chair over the exact spot where the pieces of the body had been hidden under the floor boards.
At first she thought this wouldn't make much of a difference, at least not until she saw the man begin to grow pale and small beads of sweat form on his brow. The girl smiled evilly to herself and bit down slightly on her lower lip thinking 'that's it, feel the guilt'. Right now the man was a rat nibbling on cheese, and she intended to be kneeling right there at the moment the trap snapped.
She could see his guilt growing by the second as he began pacing across the room. The cheese was almost gone, which meant that the trap would nap at any moment. Suddenly, she noticed the two policemen getting up and heading for the door. 'No! Not now! Not when he's about to crack!' she thought eagerly. Then, out of the blue, the man threw down his clenched hand and began yelling his confession to the officers so loudly that she could almost hear him herself. But just as the officers jumped back at his sudden outburst and she felt satisfied, a question came to her.
Why didn't the man just put the body back under the sheets and pretend the old man had died in his sleep?