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    Ripper's Ring
    Ripper's Ring
    Ripper's Ring
    Ebook66 pages56 minutes

    Ripper's Ring

    By Steven R. Southard

    ()

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    About this ebook

    In the East End slums of London in 1888, a carriage-man named Horace Grott takes a ring from a corpse. Not just any ring, it’s the one Plato wrote about, the legendary Ring of Gyges, which makes its wearer vanish. With this power of invisibility, Horace steals food, lives in mansions . . . and commits murder. Within Scotland Yard, Detective Wellington Bentbow works to solve a mystery only he can decipher, reaching conclusions nobody else would believe. Learn why the crimes of Jack the Ripper have never been solved, and ask yourself whether you could resist the awesome and ghastly temptations of Plato’s Ring of Gyges . . . Ripper’s Ring.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGypsy Shadow Publishing, LLC
    Release dateMay 3, 2015
    ISBN9781619502505
    Ripper's Ring
    Author

    Steven R. Southard

    Growing up in the Midwest, Steven R. Southard always found the distant oceans exotic and tantalizing. He served aboard submarines and now works as a civilian naval engineer. In his stories, he takes readers on journeys of discovery in many seas and various vessels. Steve has written in the historical, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and steampunk genres. Come aboard at http://sites.google.com/site/stevenrsouthard/ and voyage with his intriguing characters in tales of aquatic adventure.

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      Book preview

      Ripper's Ring - Steven R. Southard

      Contents

      Copyright Page

      Dedication

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      About the Author

      Ripper’s Ring

      by

      Steven R. Southard

      All rights reserved

      Copyright © February 12, 2015, Steven R. Southard

      Cover Art Copyright © 2015, Charlotte Holley

      Gypsy Shadow Publishing, LLC.

      Lockhart, TX

      www.gypsyshadow.com

      Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

      No part of this book may be reproduced or shared by any electronic or mechanical means, including but not limited to printing, file sharing, and email, without prior written permission from Gypsy Shadow Publishing, LLC.

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      ISBN: 978-1-61950-250-5

      Published in the United States of America

      First eBook Edition: May 1, 2015

      Dedication

      To my father, who introduced me to philosophy, the art of persistent questioning. Children seek answers, and most parents supply them, but philosophical parents pose the deeper questions their children can spend a lifetime exploring. Thanks, Dad!

      Chapter 1

      From his pocket, Horace Grott pulled the gold ring he’d filched earlier. He set it on his rickety nightstand, atop a yellowing, year-old 1887 copy of the East London Observer he’d never bothered to throw away. The ring looked old—bloody old—smooth on the sides from wear, but scratched and dented in other parts.

      He sat on his bunk scowling at the ring, alone in the tenement room he shared with three other men. Working-class men of Whitechapel; one worked at the Thames docks and the other two on the Tower Bridge construction site. Horace worked at a mortuary, driving the horse carriage to haul corpses from the hospital or from people’s homes. He hated both the work and his boss, but better that than the back-breaking jobs of his roommates.

      Looking at the antique ring, he wondered what he’d get from hocking it. The thing looked like something a blacksmith made with hammer and chisel. It bore a triangular top of dull metal, iron maybe, rather than a gemstone. No jeweler had crafted this. Such a plain design and large size marked it as a man’s ring. Still, the ring itself looked like gold, so it had to be worth something. Pawning this clunky thing wouldn’t make him as rich as Queen Victoria, but he might at least buy a proper suit of clothes and perhaps get a job as a clerk. Much preferable, that, to carting dead bodies around London at all hours of the day and night.

      This ring might be my ticket out o’ this slum.

      It sure wouldn’t have helped the dead bloke whose finger he’d swiped it from. You can’t call it stealing, Horace figured, when you take it from a corpse on its way to the morgue. Most often, families removed jewelry from bodies before turning them over to him, so he’d gotten lucky this time.

      No ’arm in me tryin’ it on, he thought.

      As he slipped it on his right ring finger, several strange pictures filled his mind. Weird images flashed, one after another, as if Horace was being shown daguerreotypes, each in color and perfectly clear.

      Blackness… a furrow in the ground… a hammer striking metal… a hand turning a ring’s stone… a man’s arm vanishing… a sleeping woman getting closer… a knife slicing a man’s neck… bags of gold coins… someone holding a crown… blackness… more knives slicing skin… spurting blood… more blackness.…

      Panicked, he yanked the ring off. The pictures stopped, but his breath came fast and heaving for another minute before he could calm down. The ring had caused the visions, but how can a ring make a man imagine things? This was no ordinary ring.

      Staring at it, he recalled one vision in particular, one that had flashed before him several times. He’d seen someone twist the ring’s stone. Upon doing so, the ring and both hands and arms had vanished. What could that mean?

      Holding his breath and tensing himself, he put the ring on

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