The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe is a story about terrible tortures. Two of these tortures, and the ones that the narrator concentrates on the most, include the pit and the pendulum. The narrator, we learn, is a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, and is in a cell awaiting his death sentence. When he awakes from his drugged state he sees a pit that he realizes could be one of the ways of his death. In his avoidance of the pit, the next torture is the pendulum, this pendulum with sharp edges and likely to kill him. The narrator avoids both the pit and the pendulum from killing him, but the psychological effects of them are likely to torture him forever.