{draw:frame} Edgar Allan Poe was an allegorical writer whose stories often left {draw:frame} the reader feeling tricked, more understanding of his personal tragedy, and messages in all his tales telling us something. One story that caught my eye was the "pit and the pendulum." It was a good and suspenseful story about a prisoner locked up by the inquisition and awaiting his execution. It started off pretty good and what made it scary of the way the prisoner described his captors by "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 to grotesqueness;" (161 Poe). The suspense was so good even when they fed {draw:frame} the prisoner food because he did not know the apparent reason they did this, was it because it was going to be his last meal soon or was it they were going to feed him to the rats after he was executed. Soon after the captors took away his food and the suspense started to increase when they released the pendulum and the "sweep of it had increased in extent by nearly a yard. As a natural consequence, its velocity was also much greater. But what mainly disturbed me, was the idea that it had perceptibly descended" (170 Poe). The rats also were a major part in the scaring {draw:frame} the prisoner and {draw:frame} the reader because they are known to be filthy and vile scavengers who will eat anything to appeal their hunger. "While I gazed, they came up in troops, hurriedly with ravenous eyes, allured by the scent of the meat" (170 Poe). The downward swing motion of the pendulum really left {draw:frame} the reader in suspense while leaving {draw:frame} the prisoner mad because he was feeling the dread of death lingering and "grew frantically mad, and struggled to force myself upward against the sweep of the fearful scimitar" (171 Poe). In the end when {draw:frame} the prisoner was about to die and all of a sudden a hand came out of now where and grabbed him. "The French army...