Day 20 of ‘A Scare a Day’ – ‘Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched’ by May Sinclair

I first read this story in the Women’s Weird collection from Handheld Press edited by Melissa Edmundson. I heartily recommend it and you can find it here. Of all the excellent stories in that collection, this is the one that stuck with me. There’s something lingeringly horrifying about its depiction of an endless and ever narrowing entrapment. You can read it here.

At first, you might think I’ve accidentally added a brief bit of realism to the list. A story of a woman and her progress through life, her loves and their disappointments. The first half of the story has nothing of horror, it’s the second half that gets you. The life story of the protagonist is laid out for you in the first half, told through her various attractions and relationships. Half way through she dies and we, with her, slowly come to grips with the afterlife. This, as Oscar Wade tells us just in case we weren’t getting it, is hell. It’s a fascinating version of hell though which is far more effective in creating horror than fire and brimstone recountings.

Explorations of hell recur in Gothic writing and I’m always fascinated by the different versions that we find. Some of my favourites are the vision of a hellish underworld in Vathek (1786) by William Beckford. Selling their souls for a little forbidden

Their hearts immediately took fire, and they at once lost the most precious of the gifts of heaven—hope.  These unhappy beings recoiled, with looks of the most furious distraction.  Vathek beheld in the eyes of Nouronihar nothing but rage and vengeance; nor could she discern ought in his but aversion and despair.  The two princes who were friends, and till that moment had preserved their attachment, shrunk back, gnashing their teeth with mutual and unchangeable hatred.  Kalilah and his sister made reciprocal gestures of imprecation; whilst the two other princes testified their horror for each other by the most ghastly convulsions, and screams that could not be smothered.  All severally plunged themselves into the accursed multitude, there to wander in an eternity of unabating anguish.

Hell here is a heart set aflame which separates you suddenly and eternally from all you’ve ever been, wanted or loved. Doomed to wander alone with your heart burning in your breast, screaming in rage and pain for eternity. A slightly more hopeful version of hell is found in the work of Margaret Oliphant. She wrote a five part ‘Little Pilgrim’ series which explores 5 different parts of the afterlife experience. You can find them all here. Her version of hell is found in ‘Land of Darkness’ which envisions hell as an endless circle of cities each with their own opposing sins where their inhabitants make themselves and those around them miserable. The cruellest of the locations, the most dedicated to violence, in which the inhabitant of hell starts is not, however, we discover by any means the worst face that hell has to put forward. Oliphant leaves a little hope in her story though – the ‘dark mountains’ through which those who choose may pass. Hell becomes a kind of purgatory which few escape, but some may.

May Sinclair’s version of hell is perhaps the most haunting of all. It’s an entrapment in who you’ve let yourself become. Our protagonist is lost in her own memories, time is rendered as space as she wanders through her history, but each path brings her back to the one sordid love affair in the middle of her life. Both she and Oscar are trapped in it, unable to escape it. She cannot go back far enough in her memories to escape it because, as the text posits, the past does not only affect the future, the future affects the past. Oscar ominously affirms that ‘you were who you were to be’. The image of their eternal togetherness uses the biblical language of marriage – the flesh becoming one – and turns it into horror.

In the last death we shall be shut up in this room, behind that locked door, together. We shall lie here together, for ever and ever, joined so fast that even God can’t put us asunder. We shall be one flesh and one spirit, one sin repeated for ever, and ever, spirit loathing flesh, flesh loathing spirit; you and I loathing each other.

The short story is created by a moral framework that the modern reader may disagree with. It is a cruel story that condemns a woman for taking an idealised spiritual love and exploring lust without it. I do find the underlying idea effective though. The idea that you are trapped in the worst version of yourself, the part she wouldn’t admit to or confess to in her dying moment, the person that she always was and never wanted to be. She’s trapped in the moment she gave up hope of anything better, or the things she wanted or wanted to believe in. She’s trapped in her own self-hatred with a man who is himself trapped, as much a victim of the compulsion of their shared hell as she is. However hard she tries, she can never escape who she fears she’s always been.