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Terretsville

The Lost Inheritance (A Charles Rikker Novel)

Join Charles Rikker as he attempts to uncover the mystery behind a strange inheritance and the mansion that came with it.
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ABOUT ME

Richard Ashland

AUTHOR OF THRILLERS AND SCI-FI MYSTERY

Writing is a passion for me and through this love for words I am able to see life from many angles and walk through life from countless points of view. I am drawn by the human spirit and what makes people tick. My eight years in the military, six in military intelligence, have given me some insights that have added to the characters in the Charles Rikker Novels. May this journey be long and beneficial to my readers.

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"We walk a thin line between Light and Dark, Good and Evil, the Heavenly Sky and the Black Abyss; one must always beware!"

- Richard Ashland

More About the Author

Is Time Travel Possible? Don’t be too quick to answer that question. Every time we gaze up into the night sky at the infinite number of glittering stars that entertain us and help us to navigate, we are traveling in time. Let’s take for example the constellation Orion, a rather popular tapestry of the night sky. Just below the three stars that make up Orion’s belt is the Orion Nebula, visible with the naked eye on a clear night. The Orion Nebula is about 1350 light years away. If you peer at it through a telescope, the sight is breathtaking. By-the-way, that nebula is about 24 light years across, so once again you are a time traveler. At a glance you are traveling back to a time that would be equivalent to the year 662 on earth; you are seeing the past.

How amazing that you can see at a glance what would take you 1350 years to reach if you traveled at 186,000 miles per second.

If a being were on a planet 49 light years from earth and studied us through a telescope on November 22, 2012, they would be able to witness the Kennedy assassination. Perhaps they could send us a message to tell us who was on the grassy knoll.

When Captain Kirk flipped open his communicator, he could instantly communicate with others and with the Enterprise. Now millions of people, including children have the same ability to do what was once thought to be science fiction.

With reference to Charles Rikker novels, If I told you that a few years ago, NASA built a very powerful computer that has developed the ability to travel at the speed of light, you’d probably say, “That’s not possible.” When Jules Verne wrote about traveling to the moon over one hundred years ago, that was impossible, too.

It’s not the idea of traveling at light speed that is so daunting, as what could happen if this technology got into the wrong hands. Not everyone is honest and altruistic, some people will stop at nothing, even annihilation, to show their own power.

No one man or group of people, or religion has the right to extinguish the human race . . . God will exercise his domain.

In less than twenty-four hours, life on earth will begin to atrophy as earth’s entire atmosphere is poisoned with the toxic remnants of seven nuclear blasts, the results of a an insane act of hatred, and technology gone horribly wrong.

There is no time for a battle, there is no intelligence to stop the catastrophic event: the wheels are turning, and the human race is on the eve of annihilation. This is not science fiction, not the war of the worlds, not nation against nation; this is man destroying mankind, hate erasing all that is good, and that which is evil awaits its greatest harvest.

Terretsville: The Lost Inheritance

About Terretsville
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White Deer: A Winter Fairytail?

About White Deer

Death Avenged: Shadows from the Past

About Death Avenged

The Bus: Ghostly Travelers

About The Bus

Richard Ashland

Author of Sci-FI and Thriller Novels and Short Stories

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Terretsville: The Lost Inheritance (A Charles Rikker Novel)

The things that happened to Charles Rikker in Terretsville in 2004 he has never shared with anyone, not even his wife. . . some things should not be talked about with anyone (and who would believe it, anyway). Since 1984, the year after Rikkers took possession of their inherited mansion, and each year after, on the first of May, the Tour of Homes members begin their journey around Stamford, Connecticut at the entrance to the long, circular drive that leads up to the old Benson Estate. They are there to witness its Greek Revival charm and to hear the stories the tour guides love to tell of its mysterious past.

‘On June 14th of 1933, the owners of the estate, Margaret and Hershel Benson, vanished without a trace. For more than seventy years the mystery behind their disappearance has gone unsolved.

Stranger yet is the hand- written, cryptic will left behind by the Bensons that would keep their Connecticut mansion from being occupied for fifty years. At the end of that fifty years, the city officials of Stamford Connecticut were collectively given the keys to the mansion and the combination to a vault tucked away within the walls of the estate. Days later, Charles Rikker, a career army intelligence officer was notified that he was the sole beneficiary of the entire estate including a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion and millions in cash. It’s been more than twenty years since Charles and his family took possession of huge manor and two things remain a mystery: Why and How did the Bensons write him into their will eighteen years before Charles was born. We all wonder if the Rikkers will ever uncover the mystery.’

March 2005. Charles and Mary discover a hidden tunnel that runs beneath the foundation of their mansion, but only after an explosion exhumes a mysterious body from a hidden grave. What secrets are hidden in the tunnel that was part of the Underground Railroad when the place was built in 1833? Is it possible that Charles will come to regret his grand inheritance?

White Deer: A Winter Fairytail? A Short Story.

For John and Marie Langley, their road trip home from Christmas celebration at grandma’s house takes a nightmarish twist when they realize they have driven off and left Suzie, their eight-year old daughter, at the gas station. Can’t happen you say?

When John and Marie realize that Suzie is not in the car, they make a “U” turn on the snow-covered road and race back to retrieve their daughter. But the gas station is closed and Suzie is nowhere to be found. Tracking what looks like Suzie’s boot prints in the snow, it appears she has fallen down a steep embankment where droplets of blood have stained the pure white snow next to a large rock rock. But there are no further tracks, and it appears that Suzie had vanished. The Sheriff is called in, a search party goes into action, finding only deer tracks where the blood stained the snow. John and Marie Langley’s journey will lead them to discover that things are not always logical. Perhaps they will never tell this story to anyone for fear of being ridiculed for an unbelievable tale. Perhaps this is a fairytale, you say? Maybe, but don’t tell the Langley’s that.

Death Avenged: Shadows from the Past. A Short Story

It was the most intense winter storm to hit the Midwest in over fifty years and the frigid blast had Detective Jake McCloud virtually locked into his building. An electronic glitch, perhaps, who knows, but the doors wouldn’t budge and for McCloud, locked doors were not normally a problem.

He looked out at the mound of snow that a few hours ago had been his car. Where were all the other cars, where did everyone else go? There were at lease forty other people earning a living in the Cobblestone Professional Center. Certainly they wouldn’t have left without his noticing. He would have seen windows being scraped, engines warming up and the cars leaving the parking lot, but he didn’t. Was he alone? He didn’t feel alone. Was it a dream, a nightmare, or was there something otherworldly at work in Jake McCloud’s world? Will an unsolved murder of thirty years ago resurface in the darkened halls of Cobblestone, the murder of his father? Had his father’s killer found his way to the son?

The Bus: Ghostly Travelers. A Short Story

Originally written for the TV show, “The Twilight Zone,” this mini thriller should only be filmed in Black and white, lest we destroy the true ambiance of “The Zone.” What happened to John Weston on that New York to California bus trip, he doesn’t much talk about these days, or what may have happened to all of his demented passengers just before they reached Selina, Utah.

PLOT
John Weston, (Captain John, some like to call him) a seasoned bus driver is plagued with a group of twenty-seven very bizarre travelers, all senior citizens, heading from New York to Los Angeles. Their obnoxious and crude behavior nearly drives Weston crazy until on the forth day of the grueling journey, the bus breaks down seventy miles east of Salina, Utah. Weston’s brother, Jake, just happens to own a towing service in Salina but can’t get to John for several hours to tow the bus in. He does , however, arrange to send an old school bus to to pick up the unruly passengers, a rescue mission perhaps. When John finally does get into Salina, his passengers are nowhere to be found . . . turns out all of his passengers were killed in a bus accident nearly forty years ago . . .