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Reading books horror If you are looking for a good book horror, you should visit our website. Electronic library is gaining popularity. Influenced by modern technology and the advent of new gadgets, people are increasingly turning to electronic libraries because it allows them to read online everywhere . Every reader thanks to his smartphone, laptop or computer, can visit our website at any time. Reading ebooks help people to make good use of free time. Our elibrary has a huge selection of genres for every taste and request.


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 it’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 it’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.




Take a look at the Thriller or Mystery,Crime section where you can find your favorite books

Read books online » Horror » Humorous Ghost Stories by Dorothy Scarborough (important books to read .TXT) 📖

Book online «Humorous Ghost Stories by Dorothy Scarborough (important books to read .TXT) 📖». Author Dorothy Scarborough



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was soft and cool as the skin of a serpent, and we departed.

For a time we sped with the rapidity of an arrow, through a misty expanse of space, in which almost indistinguishable silhouettes flashed by us, on the right and left.

For an instant we saw nothing but sea and sky.

A few minutes later, towering obelisks, pillars, the sloping outlines of the sphinx, were designed against the horizon.

We had arrived.

The princess conducted me to the side of a mountain of red granite in which there was an aperture so low and narrow that, had it not been marked by two monoliths covered with bizarre carvings, it would have been difficult to distinguish from the fissures in the rock.

Hermonthis lighted a torch and led the way.

The corridors were hewn through the living rock. The walls, with panels covered with hieroglyphics, and representations of allegorical processions, must have been the work of thousands of hands for thousands of years; the corridors, of an interminable length, ended in square rooms, in the middle of which pits had been constructed, to which we descended by means of crampons or spiral staircases. These pits led us into other rooms, from which opened out other corridors embellished in the same bizarre manner with sparrow-hawks, serpents coiled in circles, the symbolic tau, pedum, and baris, prodigious works which no living eye should ever see, interminable legends in granite which only the dead throughout eternity have time to read.

At last we reached a hall so vast, so boundless, so immeasurable, that its limits could not be discerned. As far as the eye could see, extended files of gigantic columns, between which sparkled livid stars of yellow light. These glittering points of light revealed incalculable depths beyond.

The Princess Hermonthis, still holding my hand, greeted graciously the mummies of her acquaintance.

My eyes gradually became accustomed to the shadowy twilight, and I began to distinguish the objects around me.

I saw, seated upon their thrones, the kings of the subterranean races. They were dignified old personages, or dried up, shriveled, wrinkled-like parchment, and blackened with naphtha and bitumen. On their heads they wore pschents of gold, and their breastplates and gorgets scintillated with precious stones; their eyes had the fixedness of the sphinx, and their long beards were whitened by the snows of centuries. Behind them stood their embalmed subjects, in the rigid and constrained postures of Egyptian art, preserving eternally the attitudes prescribed by the hieratic code. Behind the subjects, the cats, ibixes, and crocodiles contemporary with them, rendered still more monstrous by their wrappings, mewed, beat their wings, and opened and closed their huge jaws in foolish grimaces.

All the Pharaohs were there—Cheops, Chephrenes, Psammetichus, Sesostri, Amenoteph, all the dark-skinned rulers of the country of the pyramids, and the royal sepulchers; on a still higher platform sat enthroned the kings Chronos, and Xixouthros, who were contemporary with the deluge, and Tubal-Cain, who preceded it.

The beard of King Xixouthros had grown to such lengths that it had already wound itself seven times around the granite table against which he leaned, lost in reverie, as though in slumber.

Further in the distance, through a dim exhalation, across the mists of eternities, I beheld vaguely the seventy-two pre-Adamite kings, with their seventy-two peoples, vanished forever.

The Princess Hermonthis, after allowing me a few moments to enjoy this dizzying spectacle, presented me to Pharaoh, her father, who nodded to me in a most majestic manner.

“I have found my foot—I have found my foot!” cried the Princess, clapping her little hands, with every indication of uncontrollable joy. “It was this gentleman who returned it to me.”

The races of Kheme, the races of Nahasi, all the races, black, bronze, and copper-colored, repeated in a chorus:

“The Princess Hermonthis has found her foot.”

Xixouthros himself was deeply affected.

He raised his heavy eyelids, stroked his moustache, and regarded me with his glance charged with the centuries.

“By Oms, the dog of Hell, and by Tmei, daughter of the Sun and of Truth, here is a brave and worthy young man,” said Pharaoh, extending toward me his scepter which terminated in a lotus flower. “What recompense do you desire?”

Eagerly, with that audacity which one has in dreams, where nothing seems impossible, I asked him for the hand of the Princess Hermonthis. Her hand in exchange for her foot, seemed to me an antithetical recompense, in sufficiently good taste.

Pharaoh opened wide his eyes of glass, surprised at my pleasantry, as well as my request.

“From what country are you, and what is your age?”

“I am a Frenchman, and I am twenty-seven years old, venerable Pharaoh.”

“Twenty-seven years old! And he wishes to espouse the Princess Hermonthis, who is thirty centuries old!” exclaimed in a chorus all the thrones, and all the circles of nations.

Hermonthis alone did not seem to think my request improper.

“If you were even two thousand years old,” continued the old king, “I would gladly bestow upon you the Princess; but the disproportion is too great; besides, our daughters must have husbands who will last, and you no longer know how to preserve yourselves. Of the last persons who were brought here, scarcely fifteen centuries ago, nothing now remains but a pinch of ashes. Look! my flesh is as hard as basalt, my bones are bars of steel. I shall be present on the last day, with the body and features I had in life. My daughter Hermonthis will last longer than a statue of bronze. But at that time the winds will have dissipated the last grains of your dust, and Isis herself, who knew how to recover the fragments of Osiris, would hardly be able to recompose your being. See how vigorous I still am, and how powerful is the strength of my arm,” said he, shaking my hand in the English fashion, in a way that cut my fingers with my rings.

His grasp was so strong that I awoke, and discovered my friend Alfred, who was pulling me by the arm, and shaking me, to make me get up.

“Oh, see here, you maddening sleeper! Must I have you dragged into the middle of the street, and have fireworks put off close to your ear, in order to waken you? It is afternoon. Don't you remember that you promised to call for me and take me to see the Spanish pictures of M. Aguada?”

“Good heavens! I forgot all about it,” I answered, dressing hurriedly. “We can go there at once—I have the permit here on my table.” I crossed over to get it; imagine my astonishment when I saw, not the mummy's foot I had bought the evening before, but the little green paste image left in its place by the Princess Hermonthis!



THE RIVAL GHOSTS

By BRANDER MATTHEWS

From Tales of Fantasy and Fact, by Brander Matthews. Copyright, 1886, by Harper Brothers. By permission of the publishers and Brander Matthews.

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The Rival Ghosts

By BRANDER MATTHEWS

The good ship sped on her way across the calm Atlantic. It was an outward passage, according to the little charts which the company had charily distributed, but most of the passengers were homeward bound, after a summer of rest and recreation, and they were counting the days before they might hope to see Fire Island Light. On the lee side of the boat, comfortably sheltered from the wind, and just by the door of the captain's room (which was theirs during the day), sat a little group of returning Americans. The Duchess (she was down on the purser's list as Mrs. Martin, but her friends and familiars called her the Duchess of Washington Square) and Baby Van Rensselaer (she was quite old enough to vote, had her sex been entitled to that duty, but as the younger of two sisters she was still the baby of the family)—the Duchess and Baby Van Rensselaer were discussing the pleasant English voice and the not unpleasant English accent of a manly young lordling who was going to America for sport. Uncle Larry and Dear Jones were enticing each other into a bet on the ship's run of the morrow.

“I'll give you two to one she don't make 420,” said Dear Jones.

“I'll take it,” answered Uncle Larry. “We made 427 the fifth day last year.” It was Uncle Larry's seventeenth visit to Europe, and this was therefore his thirty-fourth voyage.

“And when did you get in?” asked Baby Van Rensselaer. “I don't care a bit about the run, so long as we get in soon.”

“We crossed the bar Sunday night, just seven days after we left Queenstown, and we dropped anchor off Quarantine at three o'clock on Monday morning.”

“I hope we sha'n't do that this time. I can't seem to sleep any when the boat stops.”

“I can, but I didn't,” continued Uncle Larry, “because my stateroom was the most for'ard in the boat, and the donkey-engine that let down the anchor was right over my head.”

“So you got up and saw the sun rise over the bay,” said Dear Jones, “with the electric lights of the city twinkling in the distance, and the first faint flush of the dawn in the east just over Fort Lafayette, and the rosy tinge which spread softly upward, and——”

“Did you both come back together?” asked the Duchess.

“Because he has crossed thirty-four times you must not suppose he has a monopoly in sunrises,” retorted Dear Jones. “No; this was my own sunrise; and a mighty pretty one it was too.”

“I'm not matching sunrises with you,” remarked Uncle Larry calmly; “but I'm willing to back a merry jest called forth by my sunrise against any two merry jests called forth by yours.”

“I confess reluctantly that my sunrise evoked no merry jest at all.” Dear Jones was an honest man, and would scorn to invent a merry jest on the spur of the moment.

“That's where my sunrise has the call,” said Uncle Larry, complacently.

“What was the merry jest?” was Baby Van Rensselaer's inquiry, the natural result of a feminine curiosity thus artistically excited.

“Well, here it is. I was standing aft, near a patriotic American and a wandering Irishman, and the patriotic American rashly declared that you couldn't see a sunrise like that anywhere in Europe, and this gave the Irishman his chance, and he said, 'Sure ye don't have'm here till we're through with 'em over there.'”

“It is true,” said Dear Jones, thoughtfully, “that they do have some things over there better than we do; for instance, umbrellas.”

“And gowns,” added the Duchess.

“And antiquities.”—this was Uncle Larry's contribution.

“And we do have some things so much better in America!” protested Baby Van Rensselaer, as yet uncorrupted by any worship of the effete monarchies of despotic Europe. “We make lots of things a great deal nicer than you can get them in Europe—especially ice-cream.”

“And pretty girls,” added Dear Jones; but he did not look at her.

“And spooks,” remarked Uncle Larry, casually.

“Spooks?” queried the Duchess.

“Spooks. I maintain the word. Ghost, if you like that better, or specters. We turn out the best quality of spook——”

“You forget the lovely ghost stories about the Rhine and the Black Forest,” interrupted Miss Van Rensselaer, with feminine inconsistency.

“I remember the Rhine and the Black Forest and all the other haunts of elves and fairies and hobgoblins; but for good honest spooks there is no place like home. And what differentiates our spook—spiritus Americanus—from the ordinary ghost of literature is that it responds to the American sense of humor. Take Irving's stories, for example. The 'Headless Horseman'—that's a comic ghost story. And Rip Van Winkle—consider what humor, and what good humor, there is in the telling of his meeting with the goblin crew of Hendrik Hudson's men! A still better example of this American way of dealing with legend and mystery is the marvelous tale of the rival ghosts.”

“The rival ghosts!” queried the Duchess and Baby Van Rensselaer together. “Who were they?”

“Didn't I

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