The Third Antichrist

by Mario Reading

Overview

From the Sunday Times No. 1 bestselling author
Five centuries ago, Nostradamus wrote of three Antichrists. Two, Napoleon and Hitler, have already bathed the world in blood. But it is the third who will bring the Apocalypse.
And his time has come.
Scholar Adam Sabir is the guardian of the lost prophecies of Nostradamus. He alone has decoded the identity of the Third Antichrist. He alone knows the one who can prevent this tyrant's rise. The fate of the world is in his hands...
The countdown to Armageddon has begun.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857894793
Publisher:	Atlantic Books
Publication date:	04/01/2014
Series:	The Nostradamus Trilogy , #3
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	640
File size:	6 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Mario Reading is a multi-talented writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His varied life has included selling rare books, teaching riding in Africa, studying dressage in Vienna, running a polo stable in Gloucestershire and maintaining a coffee plantation in Mexico. An acknowledged expert on the prophecies of Nostradamus, Reading is the author of eight non-fiction titles and five novels published in the UK and around the world. Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies for the Future became a Sunday Times PB No. 1 bestseller seven years after publication.
Mario Reading is a multi-talented writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His varied life has included selling rare books, teaching riding in Africa, studying dressage in Vienna, running a polo stable in Gloucestershire and maintaining a coffee plantation in Mexico. An acknowledged expert on the prophecies of Nostradamus, Reading is the author of five non-fiction titles published in the UK and around the world.

Read an Excerpt

The Third Antichrist

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By Mario Reading

Atlantic Books Ltd

Copyright © 2011 Mario Reading
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85789-666-7

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CHAPTER 1

Dracul Lupei killed his first man when he was twelve years old. On his birthday. Thursday, 7 October 1982.

He did not intend to. But later, when he bothered to think about it, he realized that it had been inevitable. Like a boy losing his virginity. But this – the virginity thing – he had done the year before with his sister Antanasia.

As far as his sister was concerned, she had only given him what she had already given to pretty much the entire adult male population of Cenucenca at one time or another. Dracul's father, Adrian, rented her out on Friday nights when he needed drinking money for his rachiu. The two siblings shared a bedroom at the back of their father's ramshackle wooden farmhouse, so Dracul had been forced to listen ever since the whole thing began, somewhere around Antanasia's tenth birthday. He had listened for four years. Then, close on the arrival of his first erection, he had tried it for himself.

But killing a man was better. Much better.

In order to earn himself a little extra money, Dracul had formed the habit of setting out, early every Sunday morning, for the thirteenth-century Orheiul Vechi cave hermitage, situated six kilometres up the valley from his father's house. The hermitage was a twenty-minute uphill walk from the nearby village of Butuceni. It was positioned on top of a wild plateau dominating the Raut River, just a few hundred yards from the equally vertiginous parish church of St Maria.

The prehistoric cave complex was almost completely sealed off from the outside world, as was the section that housed the now abandoned troglodyte monastery, which was set high on a massive limestone buttress overlooking the gorge. The remaining hermitage, which was all that was left of the once thriving Pestere monastery, loomed over a landscape that resembled nothing so much as a slice of the planet Mars, transposed, like an alien spaceship, onto the Gaeto-Dacian plateau.

The main chapel, which formed part of a vast honeycomb formation beneath the surface of the plateau, could only be reached via a stout door, and from there down a flight of stone steps which led to the main crypt. The crypt contained a carved wooden reredos, built to the exact dimensions of the cave, and a few random pieces of furniture laid out over threadbare oriental carpets. Devotional paintings and ancient icons were scattered about the walls. The solitary embrasure let in little light, and the door that led through to the unfenced stone walkway overlooking the river, 200 feet below, let in little more, for it was covered in its entirety by a frayed set of damask hangings that some generous soul had donated to the hermitage when they were no longer of use elsewhere.

One old monk occupied the hermitage these days, and he spent most of his time praying, reading the Bible, or painting icons, and was thus tolerated by the state authorities. So Dracul had been able, by degree, to make the exterior of the cave complex his own.

When touring parties visited – Young Communists maybe, or the Society of Cognac Workers, or members of the nomenklatura, drunk after a visit to the nearby Cricova or Cojusna wineries and craving a breath of fresh upland air – Dracul would be there, waiting for them. Then, depending on the inebriated or non-inebriated state of the party, and on whether they had formal guides or not, he would step in and offer his services.

'You give me money. I take you places you never see. Secret places. You see views that make you sick with fear. You see snakes. You see wild boar. You see wolves. Maybe even bears.' It was all bullshit of course, but as Dracul insisted on being paid upfront, he was generally able to show the expectant tourists a clean set of heels before the promised wonders failed to appear. There were, needless to say, few repeat visits.

Dracul wasn't an easy boy to get past. From earliest childhood he had been a natural salesman. Golden-tongued, his mother had called him – her golden boy. If the visiting parties refused to employ him, Dracul would spread-eagle himself across the single main entrance to the rock-cave complex and refuse to move. This presented the visitors with something of a conundrum.

They could either remove him bodily – but there was usually some good soul around to object to grown men or women abusing a child – or they could come to an accommodation with him and be permitted inside. And the accommodation was generally easier.

Especially if one were drunk and out of one's head, like the astronaut Yuri Gagarin had been for two days, in 1966, during a visit to the Cricova winery. The Moldovan authorities had finally sent down a search team to identify and carry him out. Dracul knew this, because his father had been part of the team. The team had been dispatched into the underground winery on the first day of Gagarin's visit. They, too, had emerged, blind drunk, twenty-four hours later. As his father said – there were 120 kilometres of tunnels in that complex, situated 100 metres below the earth's surface, of which a full 60 kilometres were used to store wine. What was a man to do? During the ensuing visit to the monastery they'd had to attach Gagarin to a guide rope in case he inadvertently stumbled over the edge of the unfenced precipice, triggering a public relations disaster that would have ended Russia's domination of the Space Race once and for all.

These days it was usually government apparatchiks – less drunk, perhaps, than Gagarin, and a great deal less eminent – who reeled up the endless stone steps leading to the great cross, which sprang, like an outstretched hand, from the pinnacle of the Orheiul Vechi plateau, halfway between the St Maria church and the sunken entrance to the hermitage.

The old monk – whose name Dracul had never bothered to learn – appeared oblivious to Dracul's goings-on. He had recently taken to crossing himself, however, whenever Dracul hove into sight, so he must have suspected something, even if the exact details eluded him.

There were times when it seemed to Dracul as if he had taken on the role of penitential burden, which the monk, by default, now had to carry. This pleased Dracul. He liked being a penitential burden.

But the murder had come as a shock, even to him.

CHAPTER 2

People almost never came to the hermitage alone. In Moldova, only high-up members of the Communist Party could afford to run cars, and such individuals were hardly likely to indulge themselves in a day trip to see a solitary monk going about his business in a 700-year-old glorified cave.

But on this occasion a black armour-plated ZIL-115 pulled up on the outskirts of Butuceni village. A single man got out. He was wearing a shiny suit, a red tie, and a white cotton handkerchief neatly triangulated in his top pocket. To Dracul's eyes, he looked like Leonid Brezhnev, whose picture his father kept on the wall of the outside privy. This man had two small medals pinned below his display handkerchief – exactly like Soviet General Secretary Brezhnev in his father's picture. In fact he gave the impression of having just left an important meeting, and of having decided, on a whim, to pass the time before his next appointment on a short rural visit. Maybe he had been born in Butuceni, thought Dracul, and wished to revisit the cherished scenes of his youth? Or maybe he was just slumming?

Dracul spied on the man from behind a shambling stone wall.

First the man smoked a cigarette. Dracul could smell the tobacco drifting towards him on the icy breeze. Then he barked at his chauffeur. The chauffeur hurried out of the car and went to fetch his employer's black fur coat. This he draped around the man's shoulders, so that the coat hung down near the ground.

Dracul swallowed. It was a beautiful coat. A transcendental coat. In fact the coat was so large and the fur was so thick that it might even double as a blanket, if necessary. Failing that, the coat could be disguised – after a theft, say, leading to a change of ownership – via a trimming away of the base, instantly transforming the coat into a jacket and matching hat. Antanasia was a skilful seamstress. She would have no trouble adapting the coat to Dracul's specifications. He might even gift her some of the remaining fur with which to make a muff for her hands against the winter chill – if she pleased him, that was, and granted him certain of the additional favours that the Friday-night visitors so frequently demanded of her.

Dracul watched the man start up the rocky steps towards the plateau. The chauffeur also watched his master, his face twisted into a supercilious grin. Then he got back inside the car, which he had left running to conserve the heat, and slammed the door against the cold.

Dracul ghosted the coat-bearer's steps towards the monastery complex. It soon became apparent that the man wished, for some reason, to visit the actual hermitage itself, and not simply the St Maria church. This decision played directly into Dracul's hands.

At the last possible moment, Dracul darted in front of the man and splayed himself across the hermitage door. 'You go in. You pay. You pay to me. Otherwise you not go in.'

Dracul's eyes played over the man's coat like a dog sizing up a marrowbone. Closer to, the coat was even more gorgeous than he had at first supposed. In fact it was the single most beautiful object that Dracul had ever seen in his life. If he had possessed a hundred rubles, he would willingly have given them for a coat such as this. But he had only eight-seven and a half kopeks to his name. Hardly enough to purchase a pair of nylon socks from the local flea market – far less an astrakhan coat.

The man punched Dracul in the face. The boy's head cracked back against the hardwood door as if pivoted on a spring. The shock was total. Dracul lurched forwards onto his knees and vomited out his breakfast.

The man kicked Dracul in the stomach. Then he wiped his shoe – which had been tarnished by some of the vomit – onto Dracul's trousers.

The man hesitated for a moment, clearly weighing up whether to kick Dracul again. Then he grunted, unlatched the door to the hermitage, and started down the stone steps.

CHAPTER 3

Dracul lay on the ground outside the monastery entrance. No one had ever hit him that hard before. Not even his father in one of his drunken rages. Dracul felt as if his jaw might be shattered. And one or two of his ribs.

He dry-retched like a cat. Then he levered himself up onto his knees. He remained on all fours for some time, his head hanging down between his shoulders. Then he lurched to his feet and staggered towards the great stone cross, his body bent double, his hands cradling his stomach like a man with colic.

Dracul collapsed in the lee of the cross. An icy wind bit into his thin jacket. He could feel it searching up the legs of his trousers.

Despite the intense pain, all Dracul could think about was the man in the astrakhan coat. The man filled him with an intense admiration. This nameless person was clearly someone of immense importance. Someone he must learn to emulate. No one, in all the years that Dracul had eked out his living from blackmailing visitors to the monastery, had ever responded as this man had done. One or two had grabbed him, it is true, or pushed him roughly aside – but never with violent intent. They had simply been reacting out of frustration.

But this man had acted without compunction. Dracul had got in his way. So he had forced Dracul out of his way. The fact that Dracul was only twelve years old had clearly not clouded the man's thought processes in the least.

Dracul hugged himself and moaned. The pain in his ribs was spreading out across his stomach. He coughed in an effort to clear the congestion in his throat, but the pain from the movement was so great that it nearly caused him to black out. He clutched at his mouth to prevent a further unwanted spasm.

It was October, and the autumn was shaping up to be a hard one. Dracul knew that he would not be able to walk far with the injuries he had sustained. Perhaps not even as far as nearby Butuceni. Would the hermit agree to take him in? Might he lie up for a while in one of the stone cubicles the former monks had used as bedrooms? Probably not. The old man spoke to no one. And he mistrusted Dracul – that much was clear. Suspected that Dracul was misusing the monastery site.

Dracul sensed, rather than saw, the man's approach. The man still had the astrakhan coat draped across his shoulders like a cloak. He stopped at the cross, ignoring Dracul completely. Then he strolled to the lip of the plateau and peered out over the edge.

Everyone did this. It was hardly surprising. It was one of the wonders of Moldova. The river snaked below the limestone escarpment – a sheer 200-foot drop from the base of the great cross – and slithered on through the distant countryside like the retreating back of a meadow viper.

Dracul leapt to his feet and ran at the man. He did not think of the pain. He did not ask himself whether he was capable of achieving his end. He simply acted. Just like the man had acted at the monastery door.

At the very last moment the man began to turn, as if he intended to fend Dracul off with the flat of his palm. But it was too late.

Dracul struck the man full in the back, just as he was swivelling, on one foot, to face his assailant. Just as he was at his most vulnerable.

Dracul was not a large boy. But he was strong. He had been used to hard physical labour in the fields ever since his sixth birthday. He was a master scyther and a master hayricker, just as all village boys his age were. His body was as hard as iron from the summer harvest.

The man began to fall.

Dracul's last conscious act was to drag the astrakhan coat from about the man's shoulders.

Then he blacked out.

CHAPTER 4

The pain in his side awoke Dracul five minutes later. He looked around for the man, but he was not there. The astrakhan coat lay beside him, however, like the sloughed-off skin of a reptile. Like the sloughed-off skin of the river that snaked through the valley below them.

Dracul could sense himself starting to hallucinate. Moaning softly, he dragged the coat towards him and rolled himself in it. The warmth and the smell of the coat comforted him immediately. He lay there for some time, immersed in the fur, not trusting himself to think.

The rush at the man had damaged something further inside him. This much was clear. Dracul could scarcely breathe. It was as if his lungs were filling up with soapy foam.

The chauffeur. The chauffeur would come up and look for his master. Then he would find Dracul. He would see Dracul in his master's coat. He would look down over the ridge. He would see his master's body on the rocks below. And his master was clearly an important man.

The authorities would take Dracul away and they would torture him. He had heard of such things happening to people who got on the wrong side of senior Party officials, or who fell foul of the nomenklatura in some way. His father regularly regaled him with gruesome tales of what had gone on over the border in Romania, at the notorious Sighet prison, before the powers-that-be had transformed it into a broom factory and salt warehouse in 1977.

The fact that Dracul was still a minor would have no effect on what they did to him. It would make it worse, perhaps. They would use him, just as the procession of men who came to his father's house on Friday nights used his sister, Antanasia. And this Dracul could not contemplate.

Once again he forced himself achingly slowly onto all fours. Still clutching the coat, he drifted to his feet and stood, swaying, near the flank of the great cross. One part of him was tempted to approach the ridge and look over the edge to see the body of the important man below – to see where it had fallen. But Dracul knew that this would be madness. He too would fall. Or the old monk would come out onto the stone terrace below the hermitage for a little air, look up, and see him. This could not be allowed to happen.

Dracul stumbled away from the cross and towards some nearby rocks. He knew, from his previous wanderings, where a hidden cave was set deep into the plateau floor. Perhaps a hermit had used it in the old days, before the time of the Soviet Union? Maybe wild animals used it now? Dracul didn't care. It would serve as shelter from the wind. No one would come there. No one knew of it. In all the years Dracul had been visiting the plateau, it had remained undiscovered.

And now, too, he had the coat.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Third Antichrist by Mario Reading. Copyright © 2011 Mario Reading. Excerpted by permission of Atlantic Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Cenucenca, Orheiul Vechi, Moldova: 7 October 1982,
Diablada Cenote, Yucatan, Mexico El Dia de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead): 2 November 2009,
Samois Old Quarry, Samois-Sur-Seine, France: 4 November 2009,
Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport: 6 November 2009,
Cenucenca, Orheiul Vechi, Moldova: 14 March 1986,
Le Domaine De Seyème, Cap Camarat, France: 8 November 2009,
Cenucenca, Orheiul Vechi, Moldova: 21 March 1986,
Brara, Maramures, Romania: 10 November 2009,
Albescu, Moldova: 6 January 1993,
Outskirts of Samois Gypsy Camp: 12 November 2009,
Albescu, Moldova: 13 November 2009,
Two Kilometres North of the Romanian Border: 15 November 2009,
Brara, Maramures, Romania: 17 November 2009,
Odessa, Ukraine: 18 November 2009,
Albescu, Moldova: 20 November 2009,
Brara, Maramures, Romania: Friday, 5 February 2010,
Le Domaine De Seyème, Cap Camarat, France: Friday, 5 February 2010,
Albescu, Moldova: Friday, 5 February 2010,
Oponici, Romania: Friday, 5 February 2010,
Le Domaine De Seyème, Cap Camarat, France: Friday, 5 February 2010,
Albescu, Moldova: Friday, 5 February 2010,
Sibiu, Romania: Saturday, 6 February 2010,
Sighetu, Romania: Friday, 5 February 2010,
Albescu, Romania: Saturday, 6 February 2010,
Transfagarasan Pass, Romania: Saturday, 6 February 2010,
Brara, Maramures, Romania: Saturday, 6 February 2010,
Transfagarasan Pass, Romania: Saturday, 6 February 2010,
Bistrita, Romania: Saturday, 6 February 2010,
Albescu, Moldova: Saturday, 6 February 2010,
Transfagarasan Pass, Romania: Saturday, 6 February 2010,
Albescu, Moldova: Sunday, 7 February 2010,
Bogdamic Camp, Romania: Early Monday Morning, 8 February 2010,
Albescu, Moldova: Early Monday Morning, 8 February 2010,
Bogdamic Camp, Romania: Saturday, 28 February 2010,
EPILOGUE,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,
The Secret Meaning of Names in The Nostradamus Trilogy,