The Pit and the Pendulum
“The Pit and the Pendulum” is another short story from the
collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories I got. It is very short indeed, barely
20 pages and covers hardly more than a single scene, but what a scene it is.
The narrator is a prisoner by the Spanish Inquisition who
wakes up in a dark cell. He has evidently sustained some sort of torture
because even the simple act of gathering his senses is an ordeal. As he slowly
comes to, he tries to orient himself, but collapses in the process.
When he wakes up, he realizes the cell is smaller than
anticipated, but taller and at the centre of the cell there is a bottomless
pit. This pit seems to be the only way out, but our narrator shrinks back from
this place as a certain death sentence. Some food has been set out for him, and
this has clearly been laced with a sedative because when he wakes up again, he
is tied to a pallet. Only his one arm is free enough to reach some food and
drink. Eventually he notices a pendulum swinging high above him. The bottom
edge of is a razor-sharp blade. His sense of panic increases when he also
notices that the pendulum is slowly descending. Over the next few pages, we
follow this increase in panic until it reaches a crescendo when the swinging blade
is low enough to cut him. Basically, his cell only holds two exits, both
through death: the pit or the pendulum.
This is a very short story, but by sticking to describing
the developing stages of the narrator’s panic and fear we get plenty of that.
By using the first-person form, it is not just him, but us who are feeling the
torture and the sense of impending death and doom. The helplessness and the
inevitability are the worst of it. There is nothing he can do but wait and
anticipate his own destruction. They say that in the last seconds before your
death, your life passes before your eyes in summary, but not in this story. It
is blind, white, all-consuming fear, you experience.
As I mentioned in my review of “The Fall of the House of Usher”,
Poe did not invent the gothic genre, but he shaped it into the form that we
recognize. This is also true of “The Pit and the Pendulum”. It is a window into
horror literature at least a century before this became a really big thing.
Modern horror uses many of the same effects and these can also be found in the
other short stories of the book. Not all are as good, but they all contain that
eerie, weird feeling that something is not right.
I am not myself a fan of the horror genre, but I recognize
the quality of these short stories and for fans of the genre I am certain this
is essential reading. It is certainly easily accomplished.
