Full Body Chills - POE: The Pit And The Pendulum (2021)

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

"The Pit And The Pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe. Adapted by Jake Weber. 2021.Intro read by Margo Seibert.Poe is an audiochuck production.Instagram: @audiochuckTwitter:  @audiochuckFacebook: /audiochuckllc

Poe is a 2021 audio chuck original made for our friends at SiriusXM. We hope you enjoy this exclusive content re-released for free on Full Body Chills. And for the best experience, we, the currency of our lives. Every day we're given our allowance, and every day we wrestle with the clock. A three-handed robber whose furious avarice knows no sleep. We scrape by for the most part, but there will come a day when we can't pay, when our last few moments are ripped away, when the thug named Time shakes us down and his bleeding scythe comes around.

In this story, every instant counts towards savings as life swings between the pit and the pendulum. The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe, adapted by Jake Wepper, 2021. Here the wicked mob cherished hatred and spilled innocent blood. The country has been saved and this cave of death has been demolished. Where once lived cruelty, there is now life and liberty. When they finally untied me and I could sit, it was such a relief I felt my senses relieving me. But then came the words, the words of my death sentence, and after that all I could hear

was a humming in my ears, like the worrying of a fan. My judges were dressed all in black, and through my pain and sleep deprivation their faces looked surreal, distorted, their lips as white as the sheet of paper on which I handwrite this account of those terrible days, the days I was tortured. One after the other, I watched as the merciless dark-eyed judges mouthed the word death, their lips drawn thin behind scraggly beards. But after the first judge, all I could hear was that hum in my ears.

I remember the curtains were heavy and made of the soft fur of some animal. There were candles on the table. I had been delirious with pain. They had kept me in stress positions so long I was having a hard time processing my surroundings. Candles looked like angels to me, white, tall and slim, their flames undulating, dancing. Were they angels come to save me? Would anyone save me? Then, like an electric shock, a realization, there were no angels in the room, only my tormentors, and that no one would come for me.

I would die soon. There was relief in that. I could rest. I could sleep at last. Peace. Anything was better than the pain and the sleep deprivation. In that moment I welcomed death. Then the judge's faces vanished, as did the candles and the drapes, and there was only

blackness. Silence. Stillness. Was I dead? Had I been executed? Obviously I didn't die, but I did lose consciousness. And I wonder if that is what death is like. Regaining consciousness is like waking from a dream you don't remember. It comes in stages.

The first is mental, a spiritual re-entering. Then the body follows, and we are, again, sentient. If we could remember the experience and separate the spiritual and the physical, what might we learn about what lies beyond the grave? I believe in an afterlife, and I believe there's a spiritual realm beyond consciousness. But it is only in fleeting moments that I can conjure up the memory of that unconscious state. Was I unconscious or did it just seem so? Was I in a fugue state drifting in and out of the present? I seem to remember tall figures lifting me and carrying me down steps, down, down, to who knows where.

After what felt like a long time, the men stopped moving and lowered me onto a flat, damp surface. The sensation of floating, of being suspended in air, was replaced by the shock of cold cement and with that my hearing became acute. I heard the loud thumping of my heart, the heavy breathing of men. I was aware now, brought back into full consciousness. With comprehension came dread, but I knew I had to do something. I had to move. The memory of the trial, the judges, the soft fur drapes all came flooding back.

I was on my back where they had placed me. My hands were loose. They hadn't been tied again, and I reached out onto the cold, damp ground. I tried to imagine where I might be, but I didn't dare open my eyes. I was terrified of what I might see and what I might not. When I did open them, what I saw was nothing. Just blackness all around. I had no more vision with my eyes open than I had with them closed.

I was engulfed in darkness, in thick, humid air that was stifling. I was struggling for a full breath, my heart palpitating. I kept still, tried not to panic, tried to think logically. Keep it together, girl, stay calm. It felt like a long time had passed since I had lost consciousness, but I couldn't be sure. Could it have been hours? time had passed since I had lost consciousness, but I couldn't be sure. Could it have been hours?

I knew I was alive although I had been sentenced to death. Another captive had been sentenced to death earlier that day and was executed immediately. Was I being kept in this dungeon until it was my turn? For how long? Weeks? Months? It made no sense. They were seizing victims for public executions to instill fear and command loyalty, to force

a populace to convert to their ideology and submit to their will. Why would they be holding on to me? I must have passed out again. When I came to and got to my feet, my whole body was trembling. I reached around and above, but I could feel nothing. I knew I would have to move, but dreaded it in case I would find I had been entombed down here. It was hot.

In the dense humidity, I was drenched in sweat. I took a few tentative steps, my eyes straining into the darkness, searching for a glimmer of light so I could get a sense of my surroundings. As I moved blindly about, I was relieved to find I was not completely encased. That at least was good news. I was not going to suffocate in the confines of a small space. Would I starve to death? Was there worse than that in store? I had heard stories of the most unbearable cruelty from this group, means of torture that seem unfathomable this day and age, which they used to brutally

conquer and control territory and enslave people. I knew I was going to die, but when and how was the question? My outstretched hands hit something, a stone wall, smooth, slimy, and cold. Following it would not reveal the dimensions of my dungeon because I had no way of knowing where I started. I had had a pen knife with me when I was captured and reflexively I reached for it, but my clothes were gone. They had undressed me and put me in a rough burlap smock. My thought had been to wedge the small knife into a seam in the masonry so I could have a starting and end point and know more about the dimensions of my cell. Instead, I tore off the hem of my frock and laid it on the floor at a right angle

to the wall and started my way around. I was barefoot and the ground was moist and slippery, and I was so tired. After a while, I slipped and fell, then I gave into exhaustion and let myself sleep where I lay. When I woke up, I found a loaf of bread and a pitcher of water beside me. I was hungry and thirsty and I gobbled the bread and gulped the water. I felt stronger now and made my way around the cell until I came across the rag I had left on the ground. Before I had fallen asleep, I had counted 52 paces, and there were 48 after that.

Assuming two paces to the yard, the dungeon was about 50 yards in circumference, but I had little sense of the shape of the vault because I had hit angles on my way. I would need to explore beyond the security of the wall. I started across the enclosure, moving carefully because the floor was treacherous with slime. I had gone about ten or twelve paces when the torn hem of my robe caught under my feet and I fell face forward landing hard on the ground. My chin was on the wet floor but my lips and the rest of my face and head were not and

were lower than the rest of my body. There was a smell of decaying matter, fungal and pungent. I reached out my arm and realized I had fallen at the brink of a circular pit. I could not know how deep it was because I was effectively blind. At the lip of the crater, I dislodged a stone and let it fall. For several seconds, it careened off the walls of the pit and was then swallowed by the water with a splash that echoed. At that moment, I heard a door opening and a light flashed through the gloom of the vault. For a split second before the door closed again, I could see around.

Another step, and it would have been the end. It would have been the death of me. I had heard of places like this. These tyrants selected you for death by either the most painful means possible or sentenced you to die publicly in the most humiliating circumstance. It seemed I had been sentenced to the former. I groped my way back to the wall. I would die there rather than the tears of the well. The death in that pit would be slow and painful. Fear kept me awake for what must have been hours, but eventually I fell asleep again.

When I woke, as before, there was bread and water beside me. I was desperately thirsty, but I couldn't quench my thirst no matter how much I drank. When I downed the last drop, I became drowsy. I had been drugged. The water had been spikediked and I passed out again. I have no idea how long I was out, but when I came to, I could see again. A surreal, sulverous light revealed my prison. I had been completely off on the dimensions. The cell was half the size I thought it was. I had to know where I had gone wrong in my calculations.

At the point at which I fell, I had only been a few feet from the strip of burlap. When I woke, I had mistakenly gone back the way I came, and so doubled in my head the circumference of the prison. I hadn't the acuity to realize I had started with the wall on my left and ended with the wall on my right. I had also got the shape of the place all wrong. I had thought, because of the irregular angles, the cell was asymmetrical, when, in fact, those irregularities in the wall were minor variations in what was essentially

a square cell. What I had thought was stone was in fact iron, or some other metal, in huge plates whose joints accounted for the irregularities that I thought was where bricks met mortar. The walls were painted, painted with crude renditions of weapons of torture operated by men, the frescoes faded and blurred by the dampness of the atmosphere. In the center of the stone floor, there it was, the circular pit, the jaws of which I had almost fallen into. There was just the one in the room.

I had to strain to see because I was on my back, strapped to a framework made from wood. My entire body was wrapped in what appeared to be thick bandages. Only my head was free and part of my left arm, just enough to reach a bowl of food which I took to my mouth. It was too late before I realized there was no water, and my mouth burned from the heavily

spiced food. I looked at the ceiling which was constructed of the same metal ore as the walls and rose 30 or 40 feet above me. Painted there was the Grim Reaper, but not as he's usually depicted. Instead of a scythe, this father time carried what looked like a pendulum, the kind you would find in a grandfather clock. Did it just come to life? I was sure I saw it move, morph from two to three dimensional.

Was there something in the food causing me to hallucinate? There was a sound to my right. I snapped my head in its direction. Up from the well came a horde of rats with red, ravenous eyes apparently drawn by the scent of the meat. For the next half hour, maybe an hour, red, ravenous eyes apparently drawn by the scent of the meat. For the next half hour, maybe an hour, time was difficult to gauge. I did my best to keep them off me with my one free hand, screaming, all the while growing

hoarse. When I raised my eyes to the ceiling again, what I had thought in the opaque lighting had been a fresco was in fact a mechanical device behind which lay the painted image of Father Time. The sweep of the pendulum had increased by nearly a yard and so had its speed. It was descending towards my body and I saw now that the bottom of the pendulum was a crescent of glittering steel about a foot in length and sharp as a razor, hissing as it swung through the air. I knew now how I was meant to die.

I had heard rumors of this contraption. No one had lived to tell the tale, but here it was and here was I. Its horror, its slow means of death would be worse than one could imagine. I had avoided falling into that pit by pure chance, by blind luck. In these torture chambers, these death dungeons, unexpected terror is what the sadistic jailers enjoy in their work. You were a toy for them to play with. They were not about to just hurl me into the abyss of the well. No, the men you hear was varied.

Just when you think you have escaped a particular torment, another awaits. I wonder if you need to hear this. What the point is of reliving the horror of those hours upon hours as I lay there and watched and counted as the vibrating steel passed over my body, descending fractionally, inch by inch, until it was close enough I could smell the steel. I prayed. It was all I could do.

I prayed for the blade to drop faster. I prayed for a speedier death than the one I was due. I tried to stretch my body towards it, anything to speed up the process, but I was helpless. All I could do was wait. Pray and wait. I became calm for a period and lay smiling at the incoming blade, like a child mesmerized by a toy. I believe I passed out again, briefly. When I regained consciousness, I saw the pendulum had not moved.

They were watching me and controlling the descent of the blade. I was to be aware of every horrifying moment of the filleting of my body. I was hungry now. Even in this state, the body needs what it needs. I reached for the bowl for what might have been left me by the rats. As I took a remnant to my mouth, a thought not fully formed occurred to me, and with it an inkling of hope. But I couldn't hold onto it.

The fleeting thought with its promise of relief vanished. The pendulum was swinging across my body, its path directly across my heart. Before it got there, it would fray and then sever the bandages that bound me. It was now swinging in a 30-foot arc above my torso with such velocity that it could have cut through the walls of my cell. When it finally reached me, it would be taken up with the thick bandages that covered my chest. I was aware of the coarseness of my robe and anticipated the tingling sensation of the scratchy fabric against my skin when the blade reached it. As the blade made its measured way towards me, I became frenzied. I traced its downward and lateral

movements as it stalked my heart. I screamed, I laughed, I howled as it vibrated within inches of my bosom. Manic now, I struggled to free my arm, but even if I had managed to get it loose, what could I have done? I was as powerless to stop the descent of that blade as I would have been in stopping an avalanche. I gasped and shrunk in convulsive tear at each sweep, my eyes following every inch of its arc. Death would have been a relief. This was unbearable. Each sink of the blade coming closer and closer to slicing into my breast. It was hope. Hope that made me quiver. That made my body recoil. The hope

that all victims of torture must feel in fleeting moments. You'll be okay. You're strong. You can get through this. You'll survive." Ten or twelve more passes and the steel would meet my robe. A calmness again washed over me, a despair of sorts. It was no longer frenzied or manic. It occurred to me that the bandages that secured me were not bound by a separate cord, meaning once the blade passed over them, I would be able to pull at them with my left hand. But that blade would be perilously close and the slightest movement could be deadly. And what about the man operating the device?

Hadn't they taken into consideration what I was thinking? Weren't they watching it all, just waiting for the precise moment when their device would slice open my skin? How would I escape right under their very noses? Was there even a bandage over my bosom? I lifted my head to look. I was bandaged everywhere except in the path of the blade, whose trajectory would pass right across my heart. My torturers had thought this through, had placed me exactly right. I had to think of something else. I was running out of time.

I flashed back to the moment I had that inkling of an idea, only to have it vanish. It was when I had brought that morsel of meat to my lips. It was a long shot, but there was an idea there. For hours now, the area around me had been swarming with rats, their greedy, hungry eyes watching, waiting for my body to be still enough for them to feast on me. They had already gotten at all but a morsel of the meat from the bowl. My free hand had been passing over that in a seesaw motion to keep them away, but after a while the regularity of the motion became less and less of a deterrent and they sank

their sharp teeth into my fingers. I had a plan now. I rubbed what was left of the meat over the bandages wherever I could reach. When I was done I took my hand from the bowl, dropped it by my side, and waited, as still as possible. The change in the motion confused the rats, and some of them shrank back down the well only to return seconds later. A few of the boldest jumped up on the wood frame and sniffed at the bandages, and this sent a signal to the rest.

Soon, the frame was swarmed, more and more of them coming up now from the well, hanging off the frame, hundreds of them climbing over my body, navigating to avoid the pendulum blade, busying themselves with the bandages that smelled of spiced meat. They were heaped on me now, writhing against my throat, their whiskers scraping my face, tails dragging across my mouth, cold lips touching mine, their acrid, rancid smell filling my nostrils. I felt I was suffocating, but I had to stay still and control the retching in my throat. One of the bandages was coming loose.

If I could just stay still a minute longer, I would be free of my constraints and I might stand a chance. The last swipe of the blade had cut through the burlap and now stung my skin, but I could move. At the next upswing of the pendulum, I carefully slid sideways and scuttled from the path of the returning blade. I was free. For the time being at least, I was free and still alive. My feet were back on the ground and I pulled at the remaining bandages until they lay in a pile at my feet. Just then the machine stopped and was hoisted back towards the ceiling.

Any hope I may have had was dashed. I was still in the hands of my torturers, of course. They had watched it all. Did I just trade one horrible death for another? I looked around at the walls of my prison and located the source of that sulfurous, yellowish light. It was emanating from a continuous crack around the base of the wall about half an inch in height. I lay on the ground and tried to see through the crack, but there was nothing beyond. I stood back up and tried to think. How could my cell walls have been raised half an inch? Were they on a pulley system? I looked around me and the frescoes that I had seen before as faded, blurred, and indistinct now appeared vibrant and sharply detailed.

All around me, vicious demonic eyes glared, rippling in what looked like flamelight. Was I hallucinating? Was I still drugged? Was I even alive? Was I in hell. Then a metallic wind wafted towards me, the odor of hot iron. The eyes that bore down on me were bright red, the red of freshly drawn blood. And there it was, the source of the hot metal smell. The red hot metal walls of my cell were coming towards me,

backing me up to the center of the dungeon towards the pit. Some say the world will end in fire, some in ice. In that moment I made my choice. The cold of the rat-infested well had to be better than being burned alive against metal. I backed up to the lip of the well and looked down. Now I could see all the way to the bottom. What I saw there I cannot relive right now. It's too soon. I put my head in my hands and screamed.

Screamed in terror, in horror, in frustration, in despair at how my life was about to end. It got hotter as the walls closed in. My torturers were losing patience with the prisoner who had twice escaped their machinations. The room was shifting in front of me. What had been a square was now an inverted triangle moving towards me, cutting off anyway but down, down into the belly of the well. Soon I would be enclosed. The burning hot walls rumbled and groaned as they reconfigured. It could not go into that pit, not after what I had seen down there, anything but that.

That is where they wanted me, my torturers, that had been their original plan. But could I withstand the pain of my burning flesh against those walls? What about the pressure? How would I resist being pushed over the edge? And now the walls were adjusting again, surrounding the well trapping me up against its lip. Any moment now, any moment, and I would tip over and plummet into that water. I let out a final, primal scream, all my despair in one plaintive moan from the depths of my soul as I tottered on the edge of that well. Then suddenly, suddenly loud blasts, what sounded like explosives, then voices,

voices in a language I understood, not the language of my tormentors. The walls were moving in the opposite direction now, rushing away from me, and the voices, the voices were close in the room now approaching me. As I tipped back towards the well, an arm grabbed mine and pulled me towards him. I looked into the eyes of a bearded JSOC man in desert camo. I later learned he was a Navy SEAL, and he saved my life.

And he saved my life.