The Creepers (Book 2): From the Past Read Online Free PDF

the
building empty save for him and his father’s body, the thought of what he had
to do, destroyed him. Images of the millions of Creepers he’d killed gnawed at
the back of his mind. For a long time, he thought those acts had not been easy,
but in comparison to his father under the blanket, they were downright
cakewalks. He could sense them but he did not know them. The dead man under the
blanket gave him life, showed him the ways of the world, and now…
     
    Howard moved without thinking. He
remembered his father telling him to keep occupied to trick the emotions, to
focus them on other things in order to make the grim work easier. He thought of
the other children. He wondered about their lives, about their hardships, and
he kept at it, concocting elaborate fantasies.
     
    He removed the blanket and slipped the
long metal spike from his belt. “I hope you are with mother now,” he said,
holding his father’s face against his chest. He drove the spike through the
temple and into the brain. It was the only way to be sure.
     
    He did not allow himself time to fathom
what might lurk in his father’s mind after death. The possibilities had him
distraught. Among all the confused thoughts in his head, one stood out. His
father’s wish that he not come back in any form. If Howard found solace in
anything, it was that.
     
    Then he shocked himself. With the sun
falling fast behind the hills, he looked at his father’s weary face. The
doctor’s eyes were closed. His beard was in need of a shave, but Howard thought
he saw a hint of a smile on the stubborn man’s lips. He gathered his father’s
things in the blanket, looping it around his shoulder. He looked to the door
with a sense of dread, but kept his mind elsewhere.
     
    With calm hands, he picked his father’s
frail body up out of the chair and stepped into the dark stairwell.
    * * * * *
    Howard leaned into the low light of the
desk lamp, examining his father’s things. He woke the laptop from its slumber
and started to browse through his father’s files. Notes, music, photos, but
nothing out of the ordinary. He tried to stay as occupied as possible. His
father’s body rested only a few rooms away. The night was well underway. The
place never felt so terrifying in all his life, even when it was surrounded by
Creepers and he had yet to develop his gift.
     
    He opened the music file and quickly
loaded his favorite song. It was one his father played often, one that the good
doctor went to on especially tough nights. He opened the picture folder and
began to flip through the images of his life.
     
    “This song is about war, about the
aftermath of war, about not wanting to be a part of it. It was your mother’s
favorite and it became mine too,” his father said, the night Terrance took his
life.
     
    As Howard flipped through the images,
the years, the faces began to fade. One by one the images became less crowded.
Howard remembered each and every one of their deaths. Most of the men had taken
their own lives. They simply couldn’t bear the guilt of what they’d signed up
for.
     
    “We held on to our history too tightly,
Howard. I’ll never understand it, but we couldn’t let it go. There was this
fascination with it, and even now, somewhere out there, I bet there are some
who still linger with thoughts of what had been in their heads. It’s just like
the garden from the song. It’s all tombstone reminders. We’ll never learn.” His
father was terribly drunk that night. Terrance’s suicide impacted him on a
level Howard would never understand, but he remembered the conversation well.
It seemed important at the time, but it wasn’t until much later that he
realized what his father was saying.
     
    “All it did was hold us back. People
would always throw around the phrase, learn from the past so you don’t repeat
it or some variation thereof, but every fucking one of them wore a liar’s mask.
The past is a shackle, Howard. It keeps you tethered to