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Today we want to introduce you horror genre. Horrors are very popular among people who like to tickle their nerves. Main characters in the horror genre are demons, evil spirits, monsters,vampires and ghouls. But itā€™s very often, when book based on true events, for example psychological thrillers.
In Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, horrors were told to each other like myths, that carry the story of the death and afterlife. Ancient people believe that reincarnation exists. Modern horror novels are include new fantastical creatures, like ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and witches.



Nowadays itā€™s very hard to force a person to believe in the truth of history, but modern reader just expects to be frightened and shocked. Horror books on our website are elicit a sense of dread in the reader through frightening images, themes, and situations.
The atmosphere of the book provokes our imagination. If the book will in your mind long time after reading , so the horror writer did his job well. After horror genre books you can even get insomnia or very bad and scary dreams.But that shouldn't stop you from reading horror ebooks. So our electronic library invite you to be a part of the mystery world of free ebooks without registration.




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Read books online Ā» Horror Ā» The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H. P. Lovecraft (new books to read TXT) šŸ“–

Book online Ā«The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H. P. Lovecraft (new books to read TXT) šŸ“–Ā». Author H. P. Lovecraft



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The Shadow Over Innsmouth

H. P. Lovecraft

I

During the winter of 1927-28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting - under suitable precautions - of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor.

Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of arrests, the abnormally large force of men used in making them, and the secrecy surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges were reported; nor were any of the captives seen thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation. There were vague statements about disease and concentration camps, and law about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, inn nothing positive ever developed. Innsmouth itself was left almost depopulated, and it is even now only beginning to show signs of a sluggishly revived existence.

Complaints from many liberal organizations were met with long confidential discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent. Newspaper men were harder to manage, but seemed largely to cooperate with the government in the end. Only one paper - a tabloid always discounted because of its wild policy - mentioned the deep diving submarine that discharged torpedoes downward in the marine abyss just beyond Devil Reef. That item, gathered by chance in a haunt of Sailors, seemed indeed rather far-fetched; since the low, black reef lieu a full mile and a half out from Innsmouth Harbour.

People around the country and in the nearby towns muttered a great deal among themselves, but said very little to the outer world. They had talked about dying and half-deserted Innsmouth for nearly a century, and nothing new could be wilder or more hideous than what they had whispered and hinted at years before. Many things had taught them secretiveness, and there was no need to exert pressure on them. Besides, they really knew little; for wide salt marshes, desolate and unpeopled, kept neighbors off from Innsmouth on the landward side.

But at last I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing. Results, I am certain, are so thorough that no public harm save a shock of repulsion could ever accrue from a hinting of what was found by those horrified men at Innsmouth. Besides, what was found might possibly have more than one explanation. I do not know just how much of the whole tale has been told even to me, and I have many reasons for not wishing to probe deeper. For my contact with this affair has been closer than that of any other layman, and I have carried away impressions which are yet to drive me to drastic measures.

It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning hours of July 16, 1927, and whose frightened appeals for government inquiry and action brought on the whole reported episode. I was willing enough to stay mute while the affair was fresh and uncertain; but now that it is an old story, with public interest and curiosity gone, I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly-shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not the first to succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination. It helps me, too in making up my mind regarding a certain terrible step which lies ahead of me.

I never heard of Innsmouth till the day before I saw it for the first and - so far - last time. I was celebrating my coming of age by a tour of New England - sightseeing, antiquarian, and genealogical - and had planned to go directly from ancient Newburyport to Arkham, whence my motherā€™s family was derived. I had no car, but was travelling by train, trolley and motor-coach, always seeking the cheapest possible route. In Newburyport they told me that the steam train was the thing to take to Arkham; and it was only at the station ticket-office, when I demurred at the high fare, that I learned about Innsmouth. The stout, shrewd-faced agent, whose speech shewed him to be no local man, seemed sympathetic toward my efforts at economy, and made a suggestion that none of my other informants had offered.

ā€œYou could take that old bus, I suppose,ā€ he said with a certain hesitation, ā€œbut it ainā€™t thought much of hereabouts. It goes through Innsmouth - you may have heard about that - and so the people donā€™t like it. Run by an Innsmouth fellow - Joe Sargent - but never gets any custom from here, or Arkham either, I guess. Wonder it keeps running at all. I sā€™pose itā€™s cheap enough, but I never see morā€™n two or three people in it - nobody but those Innsmouth folk. Leaves the square - front of Hammondā€™s Drug Store - at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. unless theyā€™ve changed lately. Looks like a terrible rattletrap - Iā€™ve never been on it.ā€

That was the first I ever heard of shadowed Innsmouth. Any reference to a town not shown on common map or listed in recent guidebooks would have interested me, and the agentā€™s odd manner of allusion roused something like real curiosity. A town able to inspire such dislike in it its neighbors, I thought, must be at least rather unusual, and worthy of a touristā€™s attention. If it came before Arkham I would stop off there and so I asked the agent to tell me something about it. He was very deliberate, and spoke with an air of feeling slightly superior to what he said.

ā€œInnsmouth? Well, itā€™s a queer kind of a town down at the mouth of the Manuxet. Used to be almost a city - quite a port before the War of 1812 - but all gone to pieces in the last hundred years or so. No railroad now - B. and M. never went through, and the branch line from Rowley was given up years ago.

ā€œMore empty housesā€™ than there are people, I guess, and no business to speak of except fishing and lobstering. Everybody trades mostly either here or in Arkham or Ipswich. Once they had quite a few mills, but nothingā€™s left now except one gold refinery running on the leanest kind of part time.

ā€œThat refinery, though, used to be a big thing, and old man Marsh, who owns it, must be richerā€™n Croesus. Queer old duck, though, and sticks mighty close in his home. Heā€™s supposed to have developed some skin disease or deformity late in life that makes him keep out of sight. Grandson of Captain Obed Marsh, who founded the business. His mother seems toā€™ve been some kind of foreigner - they say a South Sea islander - so everybody raised Cain when he married an Ipswich girl fifty years ago. They always do that about Innsmouth people, and folks here and hereabouts always try to cover up any Innsmouth blood they have in ā€˜em. But Marshā€™s children and grandchildren look just like anyone else farā€™s I can see. Iā€™ve had ā€˜em pointed out to me here - though, come to think of it, the elder children donā€™t seem to be around lately. Never saw the old man.

ā€œAnd why is everybody so down on Innsmouth? Well, young fellow, you mustnā€™t take too much stock in what people here say. Theyā€™re hard to get started, but once they do get started they never let up. Theyā€™ve been telling things about Innsmouth - whispering ā€˜em, mostly - for the last hundred years, I guess, and I gather theyā€™re more scared than anything else. Some of the stories would make you laugh - about old Captain Marsh driving bargains with the devil and bringing imps out of hell to live in Innsmouth, or about some kind of devil-worship and awful sacrifices in some place near the wharves that people stumbled on around 1845 or thereabouts - but I come from Panton, Vermont, and that kind of story donā€™t go down with me.

ā€œYou ought to hear, though, what some of the old-timers tell about the black reef off the coast - Devil Reef, they call it. Itā€™s well above water a good part of the time, and never much below it, but at that you could hardly call it an island. The story is that thereā€™s a whole legion of devils seen sometimes on that reef-sprawled about, or darting in and out of some kind of caves near the top. Itā€™s a rugged, uneven thing, a good bit over a mile out, and toward the end of shipping days sailors used to make big detours just to avoid it.

ā€œThat is, sailors that didnā€™t hail from Innsmouth. One of the things they had against old Captain Marsh was that he was supposed to land on it sometimes at night when the tide was rightā€¦ Maybe he did, for I dare say the rock formation was interesting, and itā€™s just barely possible he was looking for pirate loot and maybe finding it; but there was talk of his dealing with demons there. Fact is, I guess on the whole it was really the Captain that gave the bad reputation to the reef.

ā€œThat was before the big epidemic of 1846, when over half the folks in Innsmouth was carried off. They never did quite figure out what the trouble was, but it was probably some foreign kind of disease brought from China or somewhere by the shipping. It surely was bad enough - there was riots over it, and all sorts of ghastly doings that I donā€™t believe ever got outside of town - and it left the place a awful shape. Never came back - there canā€™t be moreā€™n 300 or 400 people living there now.

ā€œBut the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice - and I donā€™t say Iā€™m blaming those that hold it. I hate those Innsmouth folks myself, and I wouldnā€™t care to go to their town. I sā€™pose you know - though I can see youā€™re a Westerner by your talk - what a lot our New England ships used to have to do with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with ā€˜em. Youā€™ve probably heard about the Salem man that came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you know thereā€™s still a bunch of Fiji Islanders somewhere around Cape Cod.

ā€œWell, there must be something like that back of the Innsmouth people. The place always was badly cut off from the rest of the country by marshes and creeks and we canā€™t be sure about the ins and outs of the matter; but itā€™s pretty clear that old Captain Marsh must have brought home some odd specimens when he had all three of his ships in commission back in the twenties and thirties. There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today - I donā€™t know how to explain it but it

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