Bestiary

He’s the face of fear, though he has no face. He can look like anyone yet resembles no one. Joe Dread is the embodiment of terror that wears a human guise. He lurks in alleys, shouts from cars, and walks loudly down the street behind you when no one else is around. Some people, though, make a friend of Dread. For them, he’s family, and his gifts to them are legion.

You’ll never see Dread clearly. That’s the point. His dominion is the unknown factor at the edge of what seems certain otherwise. At times, he’ll crouch on your shoulders when you’re trying to get things done, or loom over your bed

on a restless night. Dread is an imp. Dread is a stranger. Dread looks just enough like one of those people to get you fired up about them, yet he can look like you as well. He’s the fiend whose face is everyone’s. Dread knows no ethnicity or class because terror haunts us all.

Some folks view Joe Dread as part of Big Owl’s brood — a servant, perhaps, or a human manifestation of the fear-god himself. That might be true, but there’s no way to be sure. These days, Dread is everywhere: screaming at you on the internet, lurking behind your best friend’s grin, knocking on your door and the then disappearing before you answer, smashing your car window just for fun so you can wonder what he took or fear that someone might be inside the car, waiting.

As a totem entity, Joe Dread gifts his chosen with Intimidation, Stealth, and Torture. He knows how to hurt folks and likes to share his secrets. For Joe, the threat of pain is sweeter than pain itself; thus, the favors he confers focus more upon what might happen than on violent acts of certainty. He’s not about beating someone to a pulp, but about getting them to fear what being beaten to a pulp feels like. Dread’s chosen people are similarly frightening, not because they use brutal force but because the potential for force always seems to hover around them. Inflicting such fear really is a kind of science, so Joe’s an

exception to the rule that Technocrats cannot bond with totem spirits. His kinsmen among the Black Suit and PsychOp ranks don’t view him as an ephemeral entity, though; to them, he’s just a guy like them, who happens to be extremely good at his job.

Despite his colloquial name, Dread isn’t bound by gen­ der. A man who fears women would meet Jo Dread instead. She sneers at him, tears him down, leaves a blank space of rejection in the center of his world or else tells that world that he’s really no one at all. Names are just conveniences we attach to things we wish to classify, and Dread reminds us we have no control. Even those who Dread befriends realize that life is full of terrors and their lives are no exception.