The worst thing about fear, from what she had read, in William James’ The Principles of Psychology, and through conversations she had had with her mother, was that it was insidious. That meant it was slow and subtle and very harmful.
Stella didn’t think she’d ever been afraid. She couldn’t remember a single time when she’d had the symptoms of fear. Well, one of the symptoms was sweating, but she’d asked and it turned out everyone sweated. Fear made a person sweat more, but so did heat and illness. She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been ill or too hot and she’d sweated more, but she’d also never measured how much she normally sweated.
Sweat was a really difficult one to measure, both physically and intentionally, to see if she was afraid.
The second symptom was shortness of breath, but that also came from exercise and heat. Actually, exercise also made people sweat more. So fear was maybe like feeling like one had exercised without actually exercising, which was about as far as she could narrow it down.
Then there was an upset stomach. Upset as in turned over, not upset as in sad. The closest thing to a sad stomach, she reckoned, was probably hunger.
The last symptom of fear she had learned was trembling.
With all the symptoms together, she was fairly certain she had never been afraid, not even at the brothel, when Brick nearly killed her. That wasn’t why she had learned the symptoms, though. No, Stella had memorised these to see if other people were afraid. It was part of her planning before she’d started her war on crime, both to see if she scared criminals effectively – although, again, the effectiveness of fear was very hard to measure – and to help her recognise victims.
She hadn’t expected to use it at home, but a skill learned for one battlefield was transferable to another, and Stella could recognise the symptoms of fear in Violet.
Violet wasn’t just afraid, though. Violet was terrified.
Stella hadn’t realised at first, because people were difficult to know things about unless they told her the things she needed to know. Her mother and her bibi-daj were easy, but she had had sixteen years to learn them. Well, sixteen years to learn her mother. Nine years for her bibi-daj, but that was still long enough.
She’d known Violet for a few days, so it was harder.
There were things that made it… she couldn’t say easier, because they weren’t in the symptoms of fear she had learned, but they made it obvious something was going on with her new acquaintance. She was very jumpy, for one thing. Everything seemed to startle her. She also constantly checked the perimeter, making sure the door was locked and so on. She didn’t do it well, she’d never been trained how to do it, but she did it.
She was soft-spoken and quiet, but that might have been character. She refused to put her foot down even though Stella’s mother had said Violet was in charge. Well, unless Stella wanted to spend money on her, in which case Violet finally became forceful, but only so she could try to refuse. Stella never let her.
Stella had thought it over. She had a notebook in her bedroom and she’d noted down everything that might be a symptom of Violet’s fear that hadn’t come up in her research. Violet made pancakes for breakfast every morning. Pancakes were fattening. She might be trying to build a layer of fat in case she ended up starving in the future.
Or she might just like pancakes.
It was so annoying to not know a person. She knew her mother so well that if Selene did anything unexpected, Stella would recognise it and probably have a ninety percent chance of understanding it. An eighty percent chance with her bibi-daj. No, seventy percent, her bibi-daj was weird sometimes, though she constantly joked that it was Stella and her mother who were weird.
Stella had a notebook full of observations about Violet, and after the observations, there were theories. Ideas. Plans. So many plans, her mother would be proud.
Stella was ready to take the first step on the first plan.
Violet was afraid of everything.
Stella was afraid of nothing.
The difference between them was that Stella had been trained by her mother.
The obvious solution was to train Violet, and that training started right now.
She eased Violet’s bedroom door open, her silk tentacles stretching into the room. They found easy purchase on the walls, lifting her up until she lay horizontal in the air. She slid herself across the room, a few feet above bed height.
Violet was making little noises in her sleep.
Stella waited until she was placed exactly above her acquaintance. She drew in a breath.
“WAKE UP!”
Violet sat up and screamed and screamed and screamed. Stella hadn’t known someone could scream continuously for so long. Teaching Violet to breathe had clearly worked. Stella was the best teacher.
Step one: complete.
Violet stopped screaming and started crying.
This was not step two.
Stella lay in the air over the bed as Violet curled into a ball below her, burying her head in her hands and crying in huge sobs that shuddered her whole body.
New plan. New plan. New plan.
Should she… touch her? Pat her shoulder? People patted shoulders for people who were sad. But Stella was the one who made Violet sad, somehow. Should she leave? Should she ask if she should leave?
She… she should probably not hang over the bed like a giant human spider. Oh! Oh, was Violet scared of spiders? It would explain why she kept checking the perimeter, but she was really bad at it. Spiders didn’t care if doors were locked, they came in through tiny holes in the walls and floor.
Stella slid soundlessly out of the room, wondering if Violet would feel better if Stella found all the tiny holes and fixed them. Did houses need tiny holes? She would have to do more research.
Well, fixing the holes would come later. Stella had a new plan.
Step one: fix Violet.
This one would definitely work, because this was a Violet plan. It had come through steady observation. It was based on Violet’s own habits. It was observational and factual and could not possibly go wrong in any way.
What Violet needed right now, what she always needed when she tried to hide that she was scared or sad, was a cup of tea. That was how Violet dealt with things. She made tea.
Stella had forced herself to drink so much tea in the past few days. She didn’t mind tea, but she didn’t need ten cups a day. Fourteen yesterday. Oh no, there would be like twenty cups today, wouldn’t there? Thirty cups? It was a bit after dawn, so that made it somewhere around maybe five or six in the morning… ugh, Violet was going to make so much tea today.
Fine. She’d drink all the tea. She’d buy more tea. Fixing Violet was more important than the fact that Stella had peed more in the past three days than she had in her entire life.
That was hyperbole. She’d peed a lot, but not that much.
She briefly wondered how much she had peed, and considered counting it today, but she didn’t have a baseline for how much she normally peed, so it didn’t seem like there was much point.
She took the cup upstairs and stopped at Violet’s bedroom. The door was still open, but Violet was gone.
There was gentle sobbing coming from the bathroom.
Stella moved soundlessly over to that door. She wasn’t sneaking, it was unconscious on her part, just the way she moved. She’d been trained out of making unnecessary noises by the time she was seven.
She knocked on the bathroom door. It opened a crack and Violet stared at the floor between them.
“I made you tea,” Stella said.
Violet stared at the floor.
Stella held out the tea.
Violet stared at the floor.
“I am sorry for appearing spider-like. I didn’t realise you have arachnidphobia. I’m going to block all the holes in the house so none can get in.” No, what was she saying? That wasn’t the plan. The plan was to see if blocking the holes was safe first.
Violet swallowed. “M-mi need… fi make breakfas’, ma’am”
“You don’t need to.”
“Can… can you… please m-mo… outta the way, please, ma’am.” Her voice was so quiet.
Stella moved to the side and Violet came out of the bathroom, as close to the wall and as far from Stella as she could be. She headed downstairs, her back straight, her head held high.
Stella sipped the tea she had made for Violet, watching the maid. She finally had the trembling symptom.
Somehow, Stella had really messed things up. She needed a new plan. She needed her notebook.
Stella did not go down for breakfast. She lay on her bed, reading the Violet notebook over and over. She’d missed something. There was something in Violet that explained her reaction, and when Stella knew what it was, she could fix it.
But the answer wasn’t obvious. In fact, after hours of going over the book, the only thing obvious was that the answer wasn’t there. Either she had missed something observing Violet, or Violet just hadn’t been here long enough for Stella to see every facet. She tried noting down the results of this morning’s experiment, but that didn’t help.
It was a problem she couldn’t solve, and she hated problems she couldn’t solve. She lay in her bed for hours, listening as Violet moved around downstairs, and trying to think up ways to fix things. What would her mother do? Well, she’d tried her mother’s methods already. That was where her training plan had come from. She’d woken up to ambush alarms for five years, and the worst thing was that they weren’t every day, and there was no pattern, so she’d never known when one was coming.
They worked, though. Stella wasn’t afraid of anything now.
She didn’t think she’d get through five years of ambush alarms with Violet. They were in the city, Violet could leave at any time. Stella had grown up deep in a forest with only her mother, and later her bibi-daj, around. Even then, she’d still run away once.
What would her bibi-daj do? She’d complained about the ambush alarms every time they happened. She might actually be the reason they stopped. Stella had always assumed she had grown past that stage of training, but maybe her mother finally listened to her bibi-daj.
What would her bibi-daj say?
“You cannot pretend to be a giant human spider above someone’s bed when you wake them up, miri chajori.”
Oh, no, that wasn’t what she would say. This was the linear problem again, wasn’t it? It was always the linear problem. Every time there was a problem, it was the linear problem. Always.
Stella growled in frustration, knowing exactly what her bibi-daj would say.
“Your plans are too linear, miri chajori. This step, that step, the next step. You never account for the actions of other people. You never plan for failure.”
Of course she didn’t. Other people were impossible to predict and if she were planning to fail, why bother planning at all? Staying in bed meant she would still fail, and she would also be warm and comfortable the entire time.
She wasn’t going to plan for failure, but she did need a plan that accounted for the actions of other people. Something like.
Step one.
If this happens, step two A.
If this happens, step two B.
If this happens, step two C.
Step two A.
If this happens, step three A.
If this happens, step three B.
And so on until she had mapped out every step. Yes!
She needed more information, first. She headed into the library that was off her mother’s bedroom and started looking through books. Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals went on the desk beside William MacDougal’s An Introduction to Social Psychology and John Dewey’s How We Think.
She settled down to learn Violet the less obvious way.
Previous Chapter: Chapter Forty-four
Next Chapter: Chapter Forty-six
Editor’s Note
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
From: The London Eye Editorial Board
Subject: Language
Date: June 19, 1922
Stella would absolutely not use a term like arachnophobia, which was coined in 1925, in the summer of 1922, three years before it existed. She might try to create such a term, but she isn’t particularly good at Ancient Greek.
Editor’s Note
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
From: The London Eye Editorial Board
Subject: Posting regularity
Date: June 19, 1922
The schedule was changing and somehow got entirely messed up. The issues with releases and tiers have now been fixed. Everything is set up and the story shall be releasing Monday, Wednesday, and Friday going forward from this point.
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