The Pit and the Pendulum

The death sentence was the last thing I heard.  I saw the lips of the judges move, but heard no sound.  Then my senses left me, and silence and darkness were all I knew.

Tall figures carried me in silence down—down—still down—into a flat, damp place.  After a time, I opened my eyes.  My worst fears were confirmed; darkness surrounded me.  I struggled for breath.  Those sentenced to death were usually executed publicly.  When would the next time be?

I felt my way around the cell.  The walls were made of stone, slimy and cold.  As I started to cross the floor, my robe tangled in my legs and I fell.  I put forward my arm, and shuddered to find that I had fallen at the edge of a deep pit.

I realized my captors had meant me to fall into this pit in the darkness and die.  A quick and easy death was no part of their horrible plan.

At last I slept.  Upon waking, a dim blue light from somewhere showed me the prison was roughly square, and far smaller than I had first thought.  The walls seemed to me now to be some kind of huge metal plates.  These were painted with horrible things—demons, skeletons, and worse images.  In the center yawned the round pit which I had avoided.

I now lay stretched on a low wooden rack.  A long strap wound many times around my body, leaving only my left arm free enough that I could feed myself from a dish which lay by my side.  It seemed my tormentors meant to torture me with thirst—for the food in the dish was very peppery meat.

The ceiling was thirty feet overhead, and made in the same way as the walls.  A strange figure painted there caught my attention, a picture of Time holding what I thought was a huge pendulum.  But while I gazed straight upward at the pendulum, I saw it swung slowly back and forth.

Perhaps an hour passed before I looked upward again.  What I then saw amazed me. The swing of the pendulum and its speed had both increased.  But what mainly disturbed me was that it was lower.  I now saw that its weight was a curved steel blade, with an edge as sharp as a razor.  Since I had not fallen into the pit as they hoped, the torturers had made a new and different death for me: I should be slowly sliced in two as the pendulum inched down.  For hours, the sharp blade lowered itself toward me!

Then a vague hope came into my mind.  As the pendulum swung across my body; I saw it would cross over the heart.  I now realized that the strap which bound me was continuous.  The blade’s first stroke on any part of the band would cut it so I might unwind myself with my free left hand.  I lifted my head just enough to see my chest.  The strap tied my body tightly in all directions—except in the path of the destroying blade.  It was I that it would slice, and not my fetters.

Then another idea of rescue came to me.  For many hours the area round the low framework upon which I lay had been swarming with rats.  They were wild, bold—their red eyes glaring at me, waiting only for me to lie still before they began to feast upon me.  With the remaining bits of the oily food, I rubbed the ties wherever I could reach them; then, raising my hand from the floor, I lay perfectly still.  Perhaps now they could be tempted to gnaw me loose.

Eventually, one or two of the boldest rats leaped upon the framework and smelled at the belt.  Behind them many more swarmed upon me in heaps and gnawed on the greasy loops.  I felt the ties loosen; I knew that it must be already cut in several places.  With a more than human courage I lay still.

At last I felt that I was free.  The belt hung in ribbons from my body.  But the pendulum already pressed upon me.  It had slit the fibers of the robe.  But my moment of escape had arrived.  With a cautious, slow, steady movement I slid from the bonds and beyond the reach of the blade.  For the moment, at least, I was free.

Free!—yet still in the grasp of the Inquisition!  I had barely moved from my wooden bed of horror when the motion of the hellish blade stopped, and I saw it pulled up through the ceiling.  I had only exchanged one form of agony for another, maybe worse than death.  But now something else had taken place in the dungeon which I could not understand.  For many minutes I sat thinking about it.

Then the nature of the chamber’s change came to me all at once.  The colored figures on the walls had now taken on an intense gleam.  Demon eyes, wildly alive, glared at me from every side, and shone with the luster of fire.

As I breathed, I smelled the odor of heated iron!  The wall itself began to glow!  There could be no doubt what my tormentors meant to do—they were firing the iron walls, meaning to roast me to death!

I shrank back from the glowing metal to the center of the cell.  Amid the thought of the fiery death now coming, the idea of the well’s coolness came over me.  I rushed to its deadly edge, straining to see below.  The glare from the burning roof lit its deepest parts.  At last I grasped the meaning of what I saw—the bones and rotten flesh, the rats still gnawing on them—oh! any horror but this!  With a shriek, I rushed from the edge and buried my face in my hands—weeping bitterly.

The heat rapidly increased, and once again I looked up.  There had been a second change in the cell—a change in its shape.  The Inquisitors’ revenge had been hurried up, and there was to be no more playing games.  The room had been square, but now the cell shifted into a diamond shape, with a low rumble of machinery.

But I neither hoped for nor wanted the change to stop.  I could have hugged the red walls to my breast, giving myself to the fire as a path toward eternal peace.  “Death,” I said, “any death except that of the pit!”  Fool!  Could I not see that the burning iron was meant to urge me into the pit?

I shrank back—but the closing walls pressed me onward.  Finally, for my scorched and writhing body, there was no longer an inch on the floor to stand.  I struggled no more, but my agony was released in one loud, long scream of despair.  I felt that I tottered upon the edge—I closed my eyes—

There was a noise of human voices, a loud blast as of many trumpets!  There was a harsh grating as of a thousand thunders!  The fiery walls rushed back!  An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell, fainting.  The French army had entered Toledo.  The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.