The Last Sermon of Nathaniel Creed

by Justin Taroli

Nathaniel Creed sat at his desk, fingers steepled beneath his chin, watching the digital clock on the wall tick from 9:59 to 10:00 PM. In one hour, he’d be going live on GodNet with his “Final Clarion Speech.” It would be the culmination of a ten-year crusade, a sermon broadcast from the deepest valley of American discontent, piped directly into the homes of the forgotten, the frightened, and the furious.

And yet his hands trembled. Not from fear—Creed would tell you he didn’t believe in fear—but from what he called “vibrational overload.” The body, he claimed, couldn’t always contain the truth. He whispered to the empty room, “They can feel me coming.”

The office was dark except for a single green banker’s lamp on the desk and the blue light of his laptop screen. The windows were blacked out with cardboard and duct tape. There was a stack of self-published books on the floor next to a mini-fridge full of nothing but raw eggs and vials labeled Pineal Protocol—Uncut. On the wall behind him, pinned above an American flag gone yellow at the seams, was a blown-up photo of a vaccine syringe impaling the Earth.

Creed's face—once considered handsome in a waxy, patrician sort of way—was now stretched too tightly over sharp bones and red blotches. His hair was stiff, dyed blond in a way that looked carcinogenic, and his voice—once a rich baritone—had taken on a raspy strain, like someone who’d been screaming underwater for years.

He stood and began pacing, murmuring to himself, a ritual he claimed sharpened what he called his “mental receptors.” Each step creaked on the warped wooden floorboards of the cabin-studio. He liked the noise. It reminded him that something beneath him might break at any moment.

“They called me a madman,” he said, not for the first time that day. “But the mad are the only people who see through the veil.”

That was the thesis, really. The thing he’d hammered into the hearts of his followers: There were lies, and then there were truths so ugly they became invisible. Autism wasn’t a genetic quirk. It was a punishment. A chemical leash wrapped around the necks of children to keep them from becoming gods. Or maybe he had that backwards. Lately, everything felt backwards.

He looked at himself in the dark mirror across the room and saw a smudge on his cheek, which he furiously wiped away. A long strand of drool still clung to his chin.

“Focus,” he said aloud. “They’re listening.”

And that’s when he heard it: the whisper. Not outside. Not in the walls. Inside. A voice, clear and small, like a child’s. “It’s all your fault.”

Creed froze. His head tilted slightly, like a dog hearing thunder under the floorboards. “No,” he said to the mirror. “No, no, no, not tonight.”

He reached for his phone and opened a secure video chat app. He called his favorite follower—Lorraine, a trembly woman from Michigan with sunken cheeks and a son she kept off all medications.

Her face appeared. “Oh! Dr. Creed—hello!”

“Have you administered the Cod Liver Purge tonight?” he asked.

“Yes, right at sundown, like you said. He screamed a bit, but I kept the tincture going. He’s so calm now. It’s like he can feel your aura in the house.”

“Good,” Creed murmured. “Good. The system is working. You’re waking up.”

She hesitated. “Sometimes I hear him saying strange things in his sleep. Like… singing. He never used to sing.”

“Truth hums through the bones,” Creed said, absently. “Don’t resist it.” Then, before she could reply, he ended the call.

He opened the desk drawer and pulled out the photo. His son, David. A quiet boy. Strange, Creed had called him—though never aloud. He hadn’t spoken a full sentence until the age of four. Hated being touched. Lined up his toys in rigid rows and screamed when anyone moved them.

Creed had once described the boy as damaged by poison. On podcasts, in books, at rallies. “A victim of the Great Syringe Betrayal,” he’d declared. “My own flesh and blood, corrupted by medical fascism.” He’d said it so many times it had calcified into truth. But it wasn’t true. No one had poisoned him. No deep-state needle. No silent genocide. Creed had simply been given a son he couldn’t love. He clenched the photo until the edges curled.

The whisper came again, louder:

“You hated him because he showed you who you really are.”

Creed stumbled back and turned toward the hallway. He needed to check the shrine.

In the next room—a cold, unfinished basement space—he’d built a sanctum. He lit it with ultraviolet strips and kept the floor covered in salt. At the center: a child-sized mannequin stitched together from doll parts and medical diagrams. It wore a tinfoil crown. On its chest, he’d scrawled DAVID REBORN in red ink.

He knelt before it. “I did what I had to do,” he whispered. “You weren’t him. You were just the shell.”

The mannequin’s left hand slowly tilted. Just slightly. Just enough to fall over. Creed gasped. He reached into the mini-fridge and pulled out a raw egg, cracking it into a chipped ceramic bowl. He stirred in a scoop of NeuroRelease Formula—a substance banned in seven countries—and held it to the mannequin’s lipless mouth.

“Drink the truth.” Of course, nothing happened. But behind him, he swore he heard breathing.

He returned to his desk but didn’t sit. He stood there for a long time, arms at his sides, staring at the hard drive on the shelf. The blue light blinked once every two seconds. He opened the drawer beneath it and pulled out a remote.

Click. The screen lit up. No speech notes. No presentations. Just folders labeled by year: DAVID 1 through DAVID 6. He hesitated. Then clicked DAVID 3. A video opened. Grainy. From a handheld camera on a tripod. David sat in a beige therapy room, no more than three years old. His hands fluttered like moths. A woman knelt beside him, softly repeating a syllable—“Ba… ba… ba…”—trying to coax it from his mouth. He didn’t cry. He didn’t scream. He just rocked. Then he looked into the camera, and for a full eight seconds, held that gaze.

Creed’s jaw clenched. He fast-forwarded through the session. David attempted to speak once—barely a sound—but Creed could be heard in the background saying, “Louder. Real words. He’s faking.” The therapist turned, murmured something off-mic. Creed’s voice again: “He could talk if he wanted to. He just likes the attention.”

Creed now—present-day Creed—paused the video. His reflection hovered ghostlike in the blank screen, the same mouth, the same bones. But David had not inherited his eyes. His were always a little too large. Always searching for something no one else could see.

He clicked another folder: DAVID 5. A drawing this time—scanned from a school worksheet. Crayons. A stick figure boy inside a box, labeled “Me,” and a bigger figure outside, with fire for hair and no eyes. Next to it, in slanted capital letters: “THIS ONE IS NOT MY REAL DAD”

Creed threw the remote. It shattered against the wall. He clawed at his face. “No,” he muttered. He didn’t know what he was drawing. He couldn’t even speak. But the silence in the room now felt intelligent—as if someone were waiting for him to admit what he’d always known. He pulled the hard drive’s cord from the laptop and flung the whole thing into the trash. Not because he believed the lie. Because deep down, part of him feared the boy had never been broken at all.

*

The wall where the remote had shattered seemed to breathe. Creed sat again, trembling, and opened a hidden tab on his laptop’s browser. Password-protected, view-only, archived from a burner stream service. SpiritFlesh Ep. 141: Dr. Nathaniel Creed, Uncensored. The thumbnail showed him shirtless, painted in ash and what he called “biofrequencies,” a strip of ayahuasca leaves tied like a crown around his brow. His pupils were massive. He looked like someone midway through drowning. He hit play.

The video flickered. Creed could hear himself breathing hard through the camera mic. “Welcome, my warriors of light,” his old voice said. “Today, I walk with serpents. Today, I drink truth straight from the spigot of the spirit plane.”

The interviewer was a skinny man in a gas mask. He asked Creed what message he’d received during his latest “flush ceremony.”

Creed stared directly into the lens. “I met them.”

“Who?” the host asked.

Creed grinned, wild-eyed. “The unborn. The ones who will never know the needle. The gods that could have been. They’re waiting. They float in the amniotic dark and they whisper.” He leaned forward, whispering: “They said my son was born wrong on purpose. That he chose it—to test me. To see if I was worthy of receiving the One Language.”

“What’s that?” the host asked.

Creed opened his mouth wide, too wide, and began making wet, insect-like clicking noises. A string of drool trailed down his chin. He hissed: “Do you hear it? It’s older than English. It’s the syntax of bone.” The host laughed nervously. Creed began rocking. “My boy knew things,” he said. “Before he could walk. Before he could speak. He looked at me and saw right through the meat. I know it. I know he judged me.”

“Did he tell you that?” the host asked.

“He didn’t need to. I could feel it. When he cried, it wasn’t noise. It was a verdict.” The screen glitched, audio peaking. Creed leaned so close to the camera that only his eye filled the frame. Then he whispered: “He was not a victim. He was the enemy.”

Present-day Creed slammed the laptop shut. His breath caught in his throat. His gums itched. His teeth ached as if something were trying to crawl out of them. He ran to the bathroom and vomited egg and bile and blood. When he looked into the mirror above the sink, the face staring back wasn't quite his. The eyes were wide. Too wide. They looked like David’s.

*

Back in the main room, he sat at the desk and wiped the sweat from his face. He had twenty minutes to air time. He needed to rehearse his speech.

“My friends,” he said aloud, standing again. “We are standing at the edge of extinction. The Great Culling has begun. Autism, cancer, infertility, homosexuality, gender confusion—it’s all by design. They have turned our children into drones. Our minds into mush. But I see through them. I have always seen through them.”

The lights flickered. And then the laptop shut off. Gone. Total darkness. A toy piano began playing in the other room. Plink, plink, plink-plink. A single melody. A scale. One key out of tune.

🎵 La, la, la, la— 🎵

He turned slowly, not breathing. The sound stopped. He waited. Then came the knock.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

Not loud. Not violent. Playful.

His bladder let go. “No,” he whispered. “No, no, no.”

The footsteps returned—soft, rapid. The sound of bare feet on wood. A child running in circles just outside his vision. He moved to grab the gun from the drawer, but it was gone. Only a note remained: You won’t need this where you’re going. Creed began to sob.

“I didn’t lie,” he choked out. “I told them the truth. They made me a prophet. I saved people.”

From behind the desk, the child’s voice again: “You saved no one.” And then they arrived. Not people, not ghosts. Figures, small and twitching, with syringes where their heads should be. Children, dozens of them, surrounding him silently. Their skin was pallid, their arms riddled with injection marks, their mouths sewn shut. They carried signs scrawled in blood:

I TRUSTED YOU.
YOU LIED.
I DIED SCREAMING.

Creed screamed. “Get back.” He began giving the speech anyway, shouting it like a man on fire: “We must wake up! We must burn the clinics! I am the cure! I AM THE—”

But the syringe-headed children began to chant, slowly, rhythmically, in perfect imitation of his own voice:

🎵 Biofreedom begins with you... Biofreedom begins with you… 🎵

The ghost of David appeared. He walked up the aisle with a needle the size of a spear. He didn’t run. He drifted and smiled. The children sang louder. Creed clutched his face and fell.

*

The room was spinning. The taste of blood lingered in his mouth, metallic and sweet. The laptop rebooted, screen flickering once, then twice, before stabilizing. It opened directly to the livestream window. The clock read: 10:58. Creed wiped his face. Reset the lamp’s angle. Smoothed the front of his shirt, still stained at the collar with something dark. He ignored it.

“All right,” he whispered. “We go forward.”

The camera’s red light blinked on. He began to speak—softly, at first. “My friends… we are standing on the edge of history. Tonight, you will hear the words they tried to bury…”

The words flowed from him automatically, old grooves in a poisoned record. But something was off. The screen didn’t show his script. Instead, lines of text scrolled upward like a teleprompter, but they weren’t his words. Not his manifesto. Not his bullet points. They were sentences. Sentences that looked like obituaries.

Nathaniel Creed, 59, of no fixed address, died in front of a live audience of zero.
He was preceded in death by his son, David, who died screaming in a house of silence.
He is survived by his delusions.

Creed froze. “No. No, no, no,” he muttered. “That’s not the speech.” The camera light flared red. And the screen changed again—to show him. But not him live. A feed somewhere else. The shrine room. And in it: the mannequin. Only now it was moving. Not stiffly. Not jerking. Fluidly. Its head turned slowly toward the camera. Then its mouth opened, and screamed.

Creed ripped the cord from the laptop but the image remained. Worse, his own reflection behind it melted. Sagging, warping, as if his face were clay left too close to the stove. His left eye drooped. His skin rippled and he screamed. The door behind him creaked open. A child entered. But not David, not exactly. This child was taller, older. His limbs too long. His face pale, stitched with faded injection scars. And yet familiar. He wore a shirt that read My Body, My Temple, and his mouth stretched wide, revealing rows of crumbling baby teeth. “Hello, Daddy.”

Creed backed into the wall. “You’re not real. You’re not fucking real.” The child walked toward the desk. The camera zoomed in on its own.

The speech on-screen began scrolling faster.

He lied. He lied. He lied.
He blamed the wrong people.
He turned his shame into sermons.
He weaponized his own son.

The lights flickered. The room behind him was now full with childlike shadows. Dozens, maybe hundreds. Some stood. Some crawled. One hung from the ceiling like a marionette, twitching in silence. They didn’t attack. They simply watched. The child spoke again, “Would you like to finish the speech?”

Creed collapsed into the chair. He opened his mouth—but the words wouldn’t come. Only blood. Thick, black, and slow, pouring down his chin and onto the desk, soaking the manuscript, curling the pages. The final line of the speech bloomed red:

THE TRUTH DOES NOT NEED YOU.

The screen shattered without warning—silent, like a window breaking underwater. The camera shut off. And Nathaniel Creed was alone again. But not really. Because from inside the mini-fridge, something was knocking.

*

They found him curled under the desk, teeth scattered on the floor, hair ripped out in patches, clutching a child’s drawing of a burning house. Scrawled on the walls, in his own handwriting:

I WAS NEVER THE CURE. I WAS THE DISEASE.