by Jeff Barnhart

Created on: August 07, 2008   Last Updated: March 22, 2010

A follow-up to the tale of the black cat written in Poe's style

Had I realized that bringing the police down into the lair where my crime had been so brazenly committed would bring guilt my way, I'd have done the noble thing and confessed to the horrible nature of my actions. However, how does one confess to killing something that has tormented you? Shouldn't the confession come from the tormentor, not the tormented? After all, being tormented isn't a crime. It's the nature of the tormented to strike out and resist such deplorable affronts. If not to fight back, then to succumb to a life of unrequited evil perpetuated by someone, or perhaps, something.

For one instance my thoughts turned to the gentlemen standing aside me, by now what must have been a shockingly, sparse white, shade of a man, that stood before them gazed hopefully into their suspect ridden eyes. "Gentlemen, " I said, with a voice shaken in fear, "What do you make of this development? Rather odd don't you think?" One of the party of police swiftly explored the fallen bricks and the dead corpse that lie rotting before his wrinkled and weathered face.

The beast that had tormented me leaped from my dead wife's skull and onto my hair. Thrashing about, I could not remove the venomous creature from my head. A loud but ominous blast of air swept past my eye and through my hair and into the beast. It fell off of my head and onto the cold cement of the cellar. I looked around in search of the savior of my torment, but found no one that I could recognize as a friend rather than foe.

One of the party of police grabbed at my arm and said, "You'll have to come with me sir. We've got a lot of questions for you and I'd prefer to ask them of you in a much calmer and a more cleansing arena than where we find ourselves at present." Of my current and rather mundane thoughts, a thought that resistance might be just the key to release my body from the torment of this instant. For my purpose here was not to guide the police to my capture, but to guide them away from me and to some other soul whose life was less than ordinary, thus releasing my soul from the sin with which I now find myself faced ten fold.

Indeed I presented myself with a cumbersome and rather handsomely difficult problem to unravel. How to rid myself of this party of police and still survive the gigantic horde of police that would be leftover to establish the proper time and point at which the hangman would be charged with the duty of pulling the

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