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Saturday, September 19, 2009
title: The Pit and the Pendulum
author: Edgar Allan Poe
published: 1842
genre: horror/short story
first line: I WAS sick -- sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me.
In The Pit and the Pendulum
a prisoner who has been sentenced to death during the Spanish Inquisition finds himself in a dark room. The man faints a few times and when he wakes up he finds himself strapped to a table with a bladelike Pendulum swinging above him and coming closer to cutting through him. He manages to free himself but he realizes there is a large pit in the middle of the room. Soon he realizes the walls are burning hot and closing in on him, moving him towards the pit. Just as he begins to fall into the pit, he hears human voices and trumpets and the fiery walls move back. The man is saved before falling to the bottom of the pit.
What boots it to tell of the long, long hours of horror more than mortal, during which I counted the rushing vibrations of the steel! Inch by inch -- line by line -- with a descent only appreciable at intervals that seemed ages -- down and still down it came! Days passed -- it might have been that many days passed -- ere it swept so closely over me as to fan me with its acrid breath. The odor of the sharp steel forced itself into my nostrils. I prayed -- I wearied heaven with my prayer for its more speedy descent. I grew frantically mad, and struggled to force myself upward against the sweep of the fearful scimitar. And then I fell suddenly calm, and lay smiling at the glittering death, as a child at some rare bauble.
I enjoyed reading The Pit and the Pendulum, and as usual Poe sets the scene perfectly. There's a dark dungeon, rats, a deep pit and a blade coming down on a man strapped to a wooden table. Sound creepy and dramatic? It is.
In the deepest slumber -- no! In delirium -- no! In a swoon -- no! In death -- no! even in the grave all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound of slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream.
It was not that I feared to look upon things horrible, but that I grew aghast lest there should be nothing to see. At length, with a wild desperation at heart, I quickly unclosed my eyes. My worst thoughts, then, were confirmed. The blackness of eternal night encompassed me. I struggled for breath. The intensity of the darkness seemed to oppress and stifle me. The atmosphere was intolerably close.
Read Poe's works for free here.
This read has been part of R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril…IV
