A History Of Fear Novels & Stories

she added. “Grandma,” I crept back into the chat. I was quite confused and scared, but I didn’t allow that to cause me to submit to grandma's superstitious utterances. I knew quite well that superstition rides on fear, and makes those who believe it to cower to submission. Once fear grips their minds and souls, they become perpetual slaves to their own imaginations. It is a kind of mythical science that ancient sages perhaps used to tame the disorderly people of their time. “Nothing will happen."

Caught in the grip of fear, Adrian started to move backward. Unfortunately, there was a wall behind him, leaving him cornered and trembling. Strangely, he felt an overwhelming sense of fear now. In the past, he could handle any situation with composure. Even when he was at his wit's end, he had never felt this scared. The man kept coming closer. Adrian's heart raced, and he nervously closed his eyes. Suddenly, the fear disappeared, but he hesitated to open his eyes. In the dark, it felt like he was reliving his entire life, from birth to growing up.

I had been afraid only once in my life, but that was exceedingly a long time ago. Unfortunately, my fear was born from it. The fear of fangs. I called it fangtophobia. Weird, I know. Scientifically speaking, that fear didn't exist. Or to be more accurate, that nomenclature didn't exist. But my fear of fangs though, for me, breathed and lived inside my entire being. Inside my blood, my nerve endings and synapses. It had haunted me always, day and night. It gave me no rest.

He thought: I have been very slow. He thought: I have been doing the thing I always do when I'm afraid—filling every hour so that the fear has nowhere to settle. Sixteen-hour days and desk lunches and declined invitations and the wrong-ratio coffee and the apartment that knows it's missing something. The fear had been there the whole time, of course. The fear didn't need space to settle. The fear was the thing he'd been running from, and running from it had only made it grow, and had only given it more territory to claim.

I thought about what Noah had said. Cracks are where the history shows through. Eleanor Wolfe's history was about to show through every crack in the structure she had built. And I found, sitting at my kitchen table with the fabric and the needle and the Monday light, that I was not afraid of it anymore. I had been afraid for five years. I was done being afraid.

Helena wrote without looking up. “Which fear is productive,” she said. “The one that sharpens the work,” Dr. Osei said. “She was afraid of insufficient precision. That fear drove every decision from 1982 onward. The Clydesdale Bank. The October 1985 document. The witness arrangement. Each of those came from the fear that the research would not be precise enough to survive. So she made it more precise. The fear produced the redundancy.” Helena stopped writing and looked at the phone.

The truth was made to serve political ends. Not due to an uncertainty of facts. Because someone felt it were not convenient the facts exist. Secrecy had long been cloaked in such terms as protection. Preservation. Stability. Necessary control. I had seen it come to pass. Again. And again. And again. A historian gets a good education in an instant.It is a fact of life for a historian that fear leaves its footprints everywhere. Especially inside archives. I still saw the fingerprints on some shelves around me.

I glanced instinctively toward the back row. Takoda was already watching me. Of course he was. The second our eyes met, something low tightened in my stomach again. He looked exhausted. Not physically tired exactly, but incredibly tense. Like he hadn’t slept a single wink. His dark gaze flicked briefly toward the side window, watching the rain slanting against the glass, before returning to rest heavily on me. Watching. Always watching. Professor Smith turned back toward the class, leaning his hip against the podium. “Historically,” he continued, gesturing with his hands, “many ancient cultures believed fear itself could function as a warning. Instinct before logic.”

My shoulders are tense, my posture a little too guarded. She deserves young. Uncomplicated. Easy. My stomach knots. I remember how she looked the last time I held her. Lips parted. Hair tangled. Whispering Don’t stop, not now, not later. I want to be yours. Completely. I’d never seen anything more beautiful. I’d never felt anything more terrifying. That was the night everything changed. And now, I feel like I’m standing at the edge of something again. Not passion this time. But fear. I go to the living room and drop into the couch, rubbing my hands over my face.

By the time Ethan left the club, dawn was beginning to stain the horizon gray. He returned home as the world woke. The front door opened softly. She was awake. Lily stood in the corner of the hall, frozen, eyes wide with terror the moment she saw him. She retreated instinctively, back pressing against the wall, arms wrapping around herself as if expecting a blow. Fear—raw and unfiltered. It should have satisfied him. It didn’t. Ethan took a step forward. She flinched. In that instant, memory surged—her lies, her calculated affection, the way she had looked at him before everything fell apart. The same fear could be another act. Another performance.