“I do,” I said hoarsely, as the awful realization drove the blood in torrents upon my heart. The doom that awaited me was dreadful indeed.

I had been lured onto the trapdoor of a diabolical mechanism whose existence was known to me from certain authoritative accounts I had read of the Spanish Inquisition. This was a singularly ingenious variation of the strappado, a common form of torture in which the poor victim’s arms, bound behind his back, are hooked by the wrist to an overhanging chain. The victim is then either drawn into the air by means of a winch or sent plummeting through a trapdoor on a scaffold. In either case, the weight of his own body causes his shoulder joints to tear loose from their sockets, resulting in the most agonizing pain.

In their diabolical refinement of every known method of torture, the black-robed judges of Toledo had added to the horrors of this torment by positioning the victim, not upon a scaffold, but over a bottomless pit, into whose prodigious depths he would dangle for what felt like an eternity. Only after being subjected to both the direst physical agonies and most hideous emotional horrors would he finally be sent plummeting into the awful abyss.

I could only surmise that—in his evident obsession with antique devices of torture—the late, eccentric master of the Asher house had constructed a precise replica of this fiendish mechanism in the depths of his own cellar.

“Farewell, brother,” said Lenore, as I vainly attempted to emit a desperate cry of entreaty from my fear-constricted throat. With one swift, unhesitating motion, she drew the lever towards her—and the trapdoor crashed open beneath my feet!

A long, echoing shriek exploded from my lips, as my left hand reflexively shot upwards and dutched at the great iron hook. I was saved!—but only for the moment. Hanging by my very fingertips, I remained in the most perilous imaginable situation. I could smell the vapor of decayed fungus wafting up from the pit—feel the chill of the bottomless abyss—hear the subsiding reverberations of a small, dislodged fragment of masonry as it dashed upon the sides of the chasm in its descent.

“You are harder to kill than I would have thought, dear brother,” said the pitiless, the maleficent female. “But it will afford me some amusement to watch you struggle.”

That struggle, I perceived, was destined to be exceedingly short-lived; for the muscular strain involved in holding onto the chain by my one operative hand was already unendurable. The intensity of my fear had also caused my entire body—including the undersides of my fingers and palms—to perspire freely, adding to the extreme precariousness of my situation.