Hello, gentle listener, and welcome to nocturnal transmissions, the fortnightly podcast that brings you dark tales both old and new performed by voice artist Kristen Holland.

It's our 50th episode. Who would have thought the authorities would allow us to get away with this

pernicious production for so long, gentle listener.

Let's be thankful that common sense has not prevailed.

We are going to mark our milestone with a story from the indisputable doyen of dread.

Edgar Allan Poe.

Our setting? The Spanish Inquisition. I'll bet you didn't expect that. Nocturnal transmissions is proud to present.

Edgar Allan Poe's

The Pit and The Pendulum. the pendulum.

I was sick, sick unto death with that long agony.

And when they had 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.

After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy, indeterminate hum.

It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution, perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill-wheel,

this only for a brief period, for presently I heard no more. Yet for a while I saw, but with how

terrible an exaggeration I saw. But with how terrible an exaggeration, I saw the lips of the black-robed judges.

They appeared to me white, whiter than the sheet upon which I trace these words, and thin,

even too grotesqueness, thin with the intensity of their expression of firmness,

of immovable resolution, of stern contempt, of human torture.

I saw that the decrees of what to me was fate were still issuing from those lips.

I saw them writhe with a deadly locution.

I saw them fashion the syllables of my name, and I shudded because no sound succeeded.

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