Arousing from a sleep, he finds by his side a loaf of bread and a pitcher of water. After drinking deeply, he realizes that the water must have been drugged since he immediately loses consciousness again, and later, when he is again awake, there is a sulfurous light which reveals that the walls are one-half their original size. Logically, he tries to determine how he originally made such an error. He knows that he is in the same place because of the horrible, dismal circular pit. But to his horror, he is now completely bound head and foot, except for his left hand up to his left elbow. He is bound to a "species of low framework of wood." Looking upward, he sees a huge razor-sharp pendulum swinging in an arch, criss-crossing his body. Turning to survey the rest of the vault, he sees enormous rats running across the slimy floor. After watching the rats for about thirty minutes, he again looks at the pendulum and is horrified to realize that the sweep has increased considerably and even more disturbing, it has descended. Now he "can no longer doubt the doom prepared for [him] by monkish ingenuity in torture." The sweep of "the pendulum was at right angles [and] was designed to cross the region of the heart." The vault and the bottomless pit are just as horrible as the very pit of hell itself might be. It seems as though it is days before the pendulum comes so close to him that the "odor of the sharp steel forced itself into my nostrils," but eventually it does, and when the pendulum vibrates within only three inches of his breast, he calmly reasons that the pendulum will cut his bandages before it will cut him. With all of "the keen, collected calmness of despair," he conceives of a plan. Using his left hand, he takes what spicy food he is able to rescue from the rats and smears it all over the bandages that bind him. The rats then throng all over his body ravenously gnawing at the bandages. The narrator, while almost succumbing to disgust, is at last able to free himself — just as the pendulum is about to cut through his clothes.
Even though he is free, however, one horror follows another. The pendulum is immediately withdrawn, thus making it apparent that his every action has been observed. Almost immediately, the dungeon becomes hotter, and he notices that the walls are not attached to the floor. It gradually becomes hotter and hotter, until the engraved faces of the fiends on the wall begin to glow. As the heat rapidly increases, the walls begin to close in upon him. For a moment, he considers jumping into the pit to escape the burning metal closing in on him. '''Death,' I said, 'Any death but that of the pit. Fool! Might I not have known that into the pit was the object of the burning iron to urge me?'"
As the walls are closing in on him, he realizes that he is being forced toward the very edge of the horrible pit. His "seared and writhing body" can stand it no more and as he lets out a piercing scream, suddenly there is a blast of trumpets and the walls roll back. The narrator is rescued, and the torture of the Inquisition is over.
