Lance Henriksen
Torquemada
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"The Pit and the Pendulum" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe and first published in 1842 in the literary annual The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1843. The story is about the torments endured by a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition , though Poe skews historical facts.
Read the classic horror story of a man who is condemned to death by the Inquisition and tortured in a pit with a swinging blade. Follow his delirious journey from sentence to escape, and his reflections on the meaning of life and death.
The Pit and the Pendulum. 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. The sentence — the dread sentence of death — was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears.
A Gothic tale of terror and suspense, The Pit and the Pendulum depicts a prisoner's nightmare in the Inquisition dungeons. The narrator tries to measure his cell, finds a pit, and fears a gruesome death by a swinging blade.
A prisoner in the Inquisition faces a gruesome death by a swinging blade over a pit. He escapes with the help of rats and a mysterious rescuer, but his ordeal has left him mad.
The narrative examines the physical and emotional fluctuations of the pure present, leaving historical and moral judgments to us. “The Pit and the Pendulum” is a traditional Poe story that breaks from Poe’s conventions: violent yet ultimately hopeful, graphic yet politically allusive.
The Pit and the Pendulum, Gothic horror story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in The Gift (an annual giftbook of occasional verse and stories) in 1843. The work helped secure its author’s reputation as a master of lurid Gothic suspense.
