He had always been the Fear, regardless of the name he was born with, and regardless of the name those he hunted knew him by, Sweet Dreams. Given to him because if he ever caught one of them, the last thing they heard besides the rattle of his smoker’s cough were those two frayed words, his favorite catchphrase, “Sweet dreams!”
He wormed his way into the minds of his victims—mostly young teens—as they slept, and stalked them through a nightmare of his own making before slaughtering them in some outlandish way. The patients who managed to escape these nightmares and share them with their therapists got the same textbook response: Sweet Dreams was a story, an empty vessel, a symbol. The mind poured its deepest fears into this vessel. Sweet Dreams was a cypher for their residual trauma, anxiety, depression—nothing more. And when these therapists received phone calls to inform them that Alice or Nancy or whoever had been murdered—their parents opening their bedroom door before the school bus arrived to find a cornucopia of organs, hair, and teeth piled on their bed—they chalked it up to this increasingly violent and heartless world of ours, not to a supernatural entity.
But he was the Fear, and in his mortal years the Fear lived in a cabin on the outskirts of a small town, working as a bus driver for a local school district. If, at the end of his route, a student was still sleeping in a back row, he drove to a vacant lot and parked the bus, his hands brushing over the tops of the leather backrests as he made his way toward the rear. The kid’s eyes would open to a waterfall of fingers cascading down his or her face. “Shh, little one,” the Fear would say. “Sweet dreams . . .”
The police failed to charge him with any of the disappearances, but a mob of parents refused to let it go. When he disappeared, they tracked him two towns over, working as a groundskeeper for another school. They didn’t care what the police said. They just knew, the way people know something without knowing how they know it. So when the law failed to deliver justice, they took it into their own hands.
They told him as much in his cabin, the Fear on all fours and struggling to catch his breath through the fumes of gasoline dripping off his body. One mother pointing a gun at him, another father writing the suicide note, the others pouring gas around the perimeter.
They fled and the Fear crawled after them. “You’ve got the wrong guy . . .”
Tears mixing with gasoline, he said, “I’m innocent!”
They sparked matches and tossed them, and the cabin lit up like a stove burner.
Of course he fucking did it. That wasn’t the point. The point was that they didn’t know he did it. Not the police, not the prosecutor, not even the judge knew. He was careful, calculating. It’s about what you can prove, not what’s true. That’s the game. The game of everything. Take it up with your local congressman, or philosopher, not with him.
Death had the familiar feeling of the Fear being stuffed into a clothes dryer when he was a kid and his mom’s boyfriend was looking for a way to keep him busy. In the blind, rolling chaos, a voice rose from the white noise, devoid of gender or form, without history or perspective—a voice for the wind or the periodic table of elements.
Do you want to live? the voice said, echoing around him in the expanse. Without understanding how this was possible, the Fear shouted in the spinning darkness, “I want revenge!”
Will you make the ultimate sacrifice?
“Yes!”
What those parents did to him, it was an example of everything wrong with the world. The weak banding together to topple the strong. By killing him, they had gone against what could be proven, which was reality, for what they intuited, which was subjective and therefore meaningless. And he simply could not abide a world where that shit was affirmed, so they all had to pay.
It was hard to know how many years passed in the dreamscape, but at some point the nightmares became more and more apocalyptic. This was how the Fear became the first to know.
He read the unconscious of his victims like chicken bones in a witch’s bowl, and what he saw were long lines for rice, overloaded morgues, power outages, death pits. Crowds stumbling through a haze in tattered clothes. Gray and desolate cities. Red lakes and beaches of salt. The earth one big morsel of blood suspended in space. The soil made of flesh and teeth and plasma. The air arterial and metallic.
The flux that carried him from mind to mind no longer dumped him into dreams. Wading in the raw for what felt like an eternity, it became harder to remember what he even was by the time the flux spat him out into another sleeping mind. And in that last mind, he found himself already in a nightmare. All around him was a crumbling city, rows of naked bodies sprinkled with lye, big red letters running vertically on a skyscraper that read WE TRIED.
A little girl was calling out for her mom. Her clothes were rags, face covered in soot. She backed into the Fear and he scooped her into his chest, her face inches from his sinewy face.
The Fear squeezed, but only enough to get her flailing. “Wake up, bitch.”
Her fists thumped against him. “Mommy!”
“That’s it. Now wake for Daddy.”
In the physical world, the mom woke to see her daughter fighting a nightmare. “Honey, wake up.” She reached over and shook her daughter’s arm. “Hey, hey, it’s okay.”
The girl turned and something flung from her into the sterile moonlight. They both looked up at the Fear’s shocked expression as he stood before them on an abandoned highway, the burnt husks of dead traffic going for miles before them.
“Please,” the mom said. “Don’t hurt us.”
But the Fear wasn’t listening. He was too busy taking it in. He saw everything man had created for himself, and it was good.
The sound of moaning woke the Wrath from his slumber, even if technically you had to be living to “slumber,” and the Wrath’s existence at the lake was anything but “living.”
The moans were a strike into the void that housed him. The outline of a perspective began to take shape.
Something was zooming out. Darkness, then light reflected off borders.
The echo of something thought, now gone forever. The sensation of a force pulling him through a sieve.
His hands and knees in the sand.
Moans.
For years, couples hiked to this lake, and for years their fornication woke the Wrath from his slumber. All died brutal, violent deaths. One cooler than the next.
The Wrath stood, and water dripped off his mask. No need to look for a weapon, the machete was already in his hand.
“Help . . .”
An emaciated old man was sitting against a tree, gray bearded, jaundiced, the soles of his feet cracked and bleeding.
The Wrath’s shadow cast over him.
“Water . . .” the man groaned.
Water dripped off the machete’s tip, so the Wrath plunged it into the old man’s throat. He drove the blade down into his gut. The old man’s stomach burst and shards of degraded plastic skittered to the ground. The machete’s serrated edge was gooey with blood and microfibers, dried beans, cigarette butts, twigs. The entrails of a parking lot albatross.
Then nothing happened. The Wrath just stood there, staring at the old man’s slack-jawed expression like the corpse would tell him what came next.
Most of the lake was a dried crater ringed with layers of sediment. At the center was a pool of silty water. The Wrath stood in it because, maybe? But the sun and moon switched places, switched back again, and still no fade into oblivion, so he left.
It was worse in town. Storefronts were blown out, glass in the gutters like New Year’s Eve confetti. The tip of his machete scraped the sidewalk where the slabs buckled. His eyes scanned for movement, for life, but there was nothing. The roads he followed became interstates. Creaking above him was the turnstile of night and day.
He was somewhere in a residential neighborhood, outside of what was left of a two-story home, the face of it ripped off and revealing both floors like a dollhouse. Someone was standing in the rubble of the living room. The shape was that of a tall, broad man with a pale white face. A spider web clung between his right shoulder and a banister that led to nowhere.
The Wrath cut across the front yard and stepped over the bricks. He saw that the man’s bone-white, pared-down features were actually a mask.
Dead vines laced over the Will’s boots, meaning he had been there a long time, not that it mattered to him. Nothing did. Behind the Will’s mask were unblinking eyes fixed on a shattered family portrait, generations standing around a frail elderly woman in a wheelchair, her shirt partially visible behind her cardigan: ODE FAMILY REUNI.
The Wrath’s bulk brushed against the Will. They turned to one another. Wave functions collapsed. Galaxies collided. Jesus wept.
By the angle of his shoulder, the Will’s arm was extended in the gesture of a handshake. The Wrath’s eyes lowered to see the handle of a kitchen knife sticking out of his stomach. He raised his machete but the Will caught his wrist. The only sounds were their feet pushing against the debris. No grunts, no screams, no blood.
A voice like gravel called out. “Look at these two bitches about to kiss.”
Both masks turned to the Fear. The smile on his face faded as the Wrath barged toward him, kitchen knife still in his gut.
“Wait a minute, Sloth! Everyone’s dead. There’s nothing in it to kill each other.”
The Wrath lowered his machete. He turned back to the rubble, but the Will was gone.
They passed abandoned checkpoints, military posts, border walls, with no real sense of where they were going. They felt only an intense pull to head south.
Maybe they were being drawn to the world’s last few survivors, but the Fear didn’t think so. Like he told the Wrath in Haddonfield, Poughkeepsie, San Antonio—he had a feel for sleeping minds, and he couldn’t feel a thing anywhere. Humanity had snuffed itself out. The world was on its way out too. The only thing he couldn’t understand was why they hadn’t died with everyone else. He wasn’t sure what it was they were supposed to do now that they were free of their domains. He wasn’t sure how long he could exist on this plane. What would happen if he died here? Would the voice be there again to bring him back? Would he return to the dreamscape? Was there a dreamscape without any dreamers?
Well into northern Mexico, a breeze swept through the badlands. On the tail end of it were the soft cries of a woman. “Mis niños . . . Mis niños . . .”
“Bullshit,” the Fear said. The Wrath stomped after the cries anyway.
Kneeling next to a dried creek was the Grief, wearing a black gown and black veil, weeping softly into her hands. “Mis niños . . .”
“Cut your shit,” the Fear said. “They’re all gone.”
Her fingers spread across her face to reveal yellow cat eyes staring back at them. She stopped crying.
The Wrath lowered his machete. He offered her his hand. She extended hers, but only to pull the knife from his gut.
At the next town, the Fear gathered books on Mexican history and a Spanish-to-English dictionary from the husk of a bookstore. It was what he did when there wasn’t a kid in the back of the bus to occupy his time: read. He read books on serial killers, dictators, hitmen; books on experiments, plagues, famine. He loved the Torah because it was the best part of the Bible. And its God was a baby killer, like him. It was a shame there could only be one God. It was the only true vocation for someone who knew the power and pleasure behind such an act. Maybe that’s why God populated the world with maniacs and killers. One needed the adulation of their rivals to feel fully appreciated.
At night, the empty buildings climbed into the star-matted sky. With nothing else to do, the Fear practiced his Spanish, getting good enough that the Grief shared her tale of woe with him, how she had drowned her two sons so they couldn’t be taken away from her. How she chopped them into pieces and threw them in the river before killing herself, and now she was cursed to walk the earth until she found them again, or two who looked just like them.
The Fear laughed. He pointed at her and then at the Wrath. “You drowned your kids, and he drowned as a kid.”
He meant it as a troll, but the Grief burst into tears and pulled the Wrath’s fire hydrant head to her chest.
“Mi niño,” she said, and the Wrath let his frame sink into her motherly embrace. “Perdóname. Perdóname . . .”
After days of seeing mountains on the horizon, they were suddenly surrounded by them. Sitting among the mountains were giant pyramids, their flat summits high above the valley.
The Fear leafed through one of his books. “Holy shit, it’s Teotihuacán.”
A red clay path led to the razed fields where the pyramids stood. They reminded the Fear of the architecture people would clutter their minds with at night. It seemed like an eternity since he was in the dreamscape. His body felt wet and heavy here. He missed the transiency of dreams, the blurring of borders. Everything was too concrete here, too restrictive.
Centuries ago, human heads rolled all the way to the bottom of those same pyramid steps. He imagined the blood soaked deep into the soil. Tens of thousands of sacrifices. Enough to replace the molten core of the world with blood. Fucking Aztecs.
The others followed him up the steps of the Pyramid of the Sun. At the top, the Fear felt a warm current running through him like electricity. The urge to keep heading south was gone. He felt home.
The Avenue of the Dead laid before them, smaller temples surrounding the behemoths: the Pyramid of the Sun, the Pyramid of the Moon, and the Temple of the Feathered Serpent.
“They would have worshipped us here,” he said. “We would have been gods.”
From his books, he already knew the gods they would have been. The Wrath would have been Tlaloc, the rain god who demanded children as sacrifice. And Crybaby Girlfriend would have been Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of streams and childbirth.
The Fear had no doubt who he was. He would have been Xipe Totec, the Flayed Lord, god of sacrifice. They even had the same ruddy skin color, but the Grief reminded him that this wasn’t actually his true body. He had been pulled into this world. His true self was in the dreamscape, so technically he was already wearing someone else’s skin, same as the Flayed Lord.
This didn’t make the Fear feel as good as he thought it would. Something he hadn’t felt in a long time filled his chest, that inner sensation of free-falling, of not knowing what comes next.
She was right. It wasn’t his body. And what revved the nameless feeling in his chest was the thought that if they opened him up, if they used the Wrath’s machete to cut him down the middle, would they find any proof that he was there at all?
The sun had doubled its size since the three of them had come together, a red star surrounded by a magnetic field that glittered at dusk. The mountains were turning to rust. He didn’t want to die. He wondered if they would still be around when the sun finally exploded, its red cloud enveloping the earth, shattering the morsel of blood into dust. Would they die, or would they be thrust into the void of space with the rest of the debris, living but not living, floating for eternity, no planet for old slashers?
There on the summit, painted in the red glow, he felt as close as he would ever get to the dreamscape again.
“Was that always there?”
They were back on the ground, and the Fear was pointing to an entrance in the pyramid’s base. A response came from the dried reeds at the edge of the razed fields, swaying in the breeze.
They crouched to enter the narrow tunnel. The uneven stone walls were cool against the Fear’s skin. An air current flowed through the passageway, gliding over them like whispers.
The tunnel opened into a large space filled with nothing but a mound of rubble. Tiny openings in the pyramid walls allowed beams of light to enter the chamber. In the dirt were footprints leading away from where they stood, disappearing into the far shadows.
This wasn’t their first rodeo, but they were typically on the other side of this game. So it wasn’t panic they were filled with, staring at the mysterious footprints, but curiosity.
The footprints traced the base of the mound to a set of steps carved into the bedrock. The stone steps descended into the mouth of a cave. They reached the bottom and spread into the darkness. The Wrath struck his machete against the craggy walls and its sparks illuminated the space in quick, seizure-inducing flashes.
It was a small chamber in the shape of a four-leaf clover. Whether natural or man-made, they couldn’t tell. The sparks revealed a small pool bubbling in the center of the dirt floor.
The Fear crouched at its edge. The fumes coming off the black, viscous surface reeked of rotten eggs and freshly tarred road. One of the bubbles burst and black spittle dotted his chest. He touched his shirt and rubbed his fingers together, studying the oily texture, when something he’d read sprang to mind.
He shot up, startling the others in the dark. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
They turned back to the stairs, but the Will was blocking their path.
According to his books, Teotihuacán wasn’t built by the Aztecs. The Aztecs were initially a nomadic tribe. They discovered the city in the middle of the jungle almost a thousand years after whoever created it disappeared.
The Pyramid of the Sun had been built over a natural cave that the Aztecs came to believe was the cradle of the universe. Caves symbolized the emergence of new worlds. Caves were portals between the gods and humans.
The Aztecs believed their world was the result of four previous worlds, meaning four previous cycles of birth, death, and reincarnation. To start each new phase, the gods sacrificed one of their own to create the new sun. Our world was the fifth and final world, and the Aztecs were the People of the Sun, whose sole responsibility was to wage war forever. This was why the Aztecs sacrificed humans, to nourish the gods that nourished them with their own blood. It was the highest honor they could provide to prisoners of war, who were treated as living gods for a year, pampered with every luxury conceivable in the pre-Columbian world. At the end of that year, the Aztecs marched this god up the Pyramid of the Sun, bound his arms and legs to posts, and ripped the beating heart out of his chest, all to keep the universe from falling apart. To sacrifice yourself was so revered that when there were no prisoners to sacrifice, the royal class willingly offered themselves.
That last part left a bad taste in the Fear’s mouth when he first read it. Sacrificers without a sacrifice. And the carousel of divinity. What was the point of being God then, if his victims were not his own, if it meant his work had been feeding something greater than himself this entire time? He didn’t kill kids to save the universe. The idea of being captured, being given everything your heart desired only to have it ripped from your chest, terrified him.
Death was just another cog in the wheel to the Aztecs, and the Fear’s only comfort, besides not being Aztec, was the fact that these were only stories. But the smell of rotten eggs was what made him realize the black liquid was bitumen, a plant resin the Aztecs used in religious ceremonies, somehow kept in its liquid form after thousands of years. Meaning this was the cave where, to start each new phase, the gods sacrificed one of their own to create the new sun.
The bitumen had already coated the Fear’s hand and was now oozing down his forearm. He reeled back as the Wrath appeared out of the shadows, machete over his head, but the Grief intervened.
“Let them fight!” the Fear said, his voice reverberating in the cave, but all she did was place a hand on the Wrath’s chest and he stopped. They turned to the Fear and watched the flecks of bitumen spread across his chest like cooking oil in a hot pan. She knew the score, even if he didn’t. The more he pawed at himself, the more it clung to his flesh, using his scar tissue like canals to spread further.
“Ayúdame!” he said.
“Mi niño,” the Grief said, watching the bitumen envelope him. “Perdóname. Perdóname . . .”
He backpedaled and his right foot fell into the pool. “Oh fuck, oh fuck!” He pulled his foot out and dragged himself toward the stairs, the oil climbing up his leg. “This is a mistake! You’ve got the wrong guy!” But the Will didn’t move; even when the Fear stamped his oily hand on the Will’s chest and the bitumen spread, the Will would not let him pass, possessed by a knowledge far beyond the comprehension of any of them.
A tremor rolled through the pyramid, shaking the ground and the cave. The Fear pitched forward on his hands and knees, struggling to catch his breath through the fumes. “No . . . no . . .”
He heard the sound of metal on stone, but instead of it being the Wrath striking his machete against the walls, it was the Will standing before him, holding his kitchen knife and a large rock. He struck them together, another blast of sparks, and the Will was now Tezcatlipoca, God of Night, God of Time, God of War. The Red of the East, the Black of the North. He was Death and Cold and his kitchen knife was as mirror-clean as obsidian, and with it he saw everything we cannot, the wheel of life and death and rebirth. Like a priest pouring baptismal water over a baby’s head, the Will struck his knife with the rock and sparks rained on the Fear’s glistening head, overtaken by the bitumen, and he was back in the cabin again. Back in the dryer. Back on his hands and knees. Engulfed in his own fear and rage, in the unfairness of it all. Because a part of him always knew this was going to be how it ended. That this was how it always ended. Each and every life. With him on fire, wondering if there was something on the other side.
It was midday, and without a cloud in the sky, the sun was at its most unforgiving. A strong wind laced with sand cut through the valley, stinging Abraham and Isaac as they pushed on. Isaac held the donkey’s reins as it jerked its head, blinded by the sand. The sun grew stronger, a mixture of sweat and sand forming a rind on their skin. The donkey pulled a small wagon filled with wood, rope, kindling, flint, and a knife. Abraham shielded his eyes and looked into the sky. He was waiting for a sign.
For three days they traveled in silence, and at night Isaac slept while his father agonized over what needed to be done. He had been gathering wood to build a home in this barren land when a voice called unto him.
Abraham . . .
He set down his hammer. “I am here, my Lord.”
Will you make the ultimate sacrifice?
“Say the word, my Lord, and I will do as you command.”
The next day, Abraham and Isaac loaded their donkey and headed into the valley.
It was the voice of the Lord that told Abraham he would have a son, a great son, a father of nations. Being old and frail, Abraham did not believe the voice. And he did not believe the voice was God. There were other men who claimed the god of one thing or another spoke to them—the god of fire, the god of rivers, the god of the moon. Vengeful gods whose idols were constructed to match their domains—burned, bloated, gaunt, stoic—who were said to terrorize nonbelievers after sundown. These prophets were madmen, and Abraham feared he was one of them, but before long, his wife Sarah bore a son. A miracle. So when the Lord asked him to offer this son as a sacrifice unto him, he knew to place his trust in the voice, for the Lord never led him astray. For he was the one true maker, creator of heaven and earth.
They came upon a mountain ringed with layers of red, white, and orange sediment leading to the summit.
And the Lord spoke to Abraham. There.
Abraham turned to Isaac, who was sitting on a boulder, petting the nape of the donkey.
“Unload the supplies and follow me.”
The son did as he was told.
They ascended the mountain in silence, save for the sound of their breath. At the summit, Isaac set down the supplies. Abraham grew nervous. He listened for God, but all he heard was the wind.
“Father,” Isaac said, “if we’ve left the donkey below, what will be our offering?”
“The Lord will provide us the offering.”
Finally, he grabbed the rope. “Turn around my son.” He bound Isaac’s hands and feet together and laid him on the wood. When the Lord did not speak, Abraham grabbed the knife and extended his hands over his head. Sweat dripped down his forehead. Isaac closed his eyes. He did not fight his father, for he, too, believed in the word of the Lord.
Abraham’s clasped hands trembled. He looked down at his son, whom he loved more than anything in the world. If the Lord wills it, he thought.
His grip tightened around the handle. The air around them became still.
He waited for the Lord to intervene, to release him from this task, to send an angel to stop him, to replace his son with a ram or goat, to explain what was meant from such a test.
His prayers were answered, for the Lord did speak in his gruff, raspy voice, the sound of pebbles being rubbed together in Abraham’s head. But it was not a reprieve, only more of His mysterious ways. Another passage in the labyrinth that was His grace, with everlasting life and love at its center. The only requirement was faith. For where was Abraham when the Lord created the lattice of the universe, to which Abraham hung his hopes and dreams, for his son, and for the future of life itself? This was only part of a greater story, an arc too vast for any mortal mind to comprehend. Our only purpose was to obey, and Abraham had done so, blade over his head and Isaac trembling on the wood. It was faith that kept the horror from rising out of Isaac’s throat and reverberating through the valley. The glint of the blade suddenly in his eyes and fear pouring into his heart as the Lord’s voice slithered into his ears. Shh, little one. Sweet dreams . . . 
Gus Moreno is the author of This Thing Between Us. His stories have appeared in Aurealis, PsuedoPod, and Burnt Tongues, an anthology. He lives in the suburbs with his wife and two dogs, but never think that he’s not from Chicago.
