Vampire: Beneficence: (Short Stories Volume III)

Three short stories:

Vampire: Beneficence
There was a short message on the piece of paper.

Sunday at noon.

It was signed in blood: Concilium Putus Visum

A vampire races against time to gather blood for a congregation and save his young girlfriend and daughter from murder by a secret Catholic cult of assassins.

The Jesus Monster
In a small settlement in the Australian Outback, the last survivors on Earth wait for the global virus called The Jesus Monster. Into their midst comes a stranger with a stranger message. This story was written, live, on twitter over a two day period and has been left unedited.

Lacunashka
Ilya Kuznetsov, a clerk in Stalinist Russia, has discovered that what he thought of as his fool-proof system of recording mail delivery has gone wrong. An envelope is missing and he is determined to find it.

Ordo Lupus and the Temple Gate - from the author:
I had been pursuing a theological interest in the Cathars; first though reading a number of books by Henry Lincoln and later an interest in Monségur and the Rennes-le-Château, near where the lost treasure of the Cathars is said to be hidden. The Cathars were an ancient sect who came to prominence and were ruthlessly persecuted by the Catholics in the 1300s, mainly in and around the Languedoc Region of France. They believed that the Christian god was really Rex Mundi, or 'God of Earth.'
The second theme I wanted to get into my novel was the gothic. The themes of blood, death, eroticism, sex and transcendence are all things that I desire in a good novel. My influences were Kate Bush, The Mission, Lord Byron, John Keats (The Eve of St. Agnes is a particularly favourite poem of mine) and to some extent Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Sex and death are the themes that everyone seems attracted to.
A year before I started this work, I read both Dan Brown and Angels & Demons by Dan Brown. These books were certainly an influence on me. Like him I have been fascinated for many years by the rumour or myth that Mary went to France and that Jesus had a descendant. Like him and many others, I speculate that the Cathars did in fact smuggle a great treasure out of Monségur castle, under the noses of the Royalist besiegers.
I couldn't resist a climax to my novel that took place in one of the world's greatest Gothic masterpieces. But you will have to read the novel to find out where ...

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