James

“Unlike the rest he had seen of the bungalow, the hall beyond the door was dark. He could see the glimmer of three doors and several framed photographs lined up along the walls. The sound of flies was louder, though they didn’t seem to be in the hall itself. Now that he was closer they sounded even more like someone groaning feebly, and the rotten smell was stronger too.”
― Ramsey Campbell, Alone With the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction, 1961-1991

“I guess they’re having what you might call panic attacks. It’s an old place and smells a little musty. The hallways are sort of long and narrow. The exhibits are gory. The people are listening to some creepy, nasty stuff on their earphones. It apparently just overwhelms some of them, especially on a busy day when there might be some congestion in the rooms and hallways. You’ll have flippers, fainters and barfers every so often.’
‘It’s sounding more fun all the time.’ ‘Not as much fun as the heart attacks.’ ‘You get heart attacks?’
‘I don’t, they do. Not often, though.”
― Richard Laymon, The Midnight Tour

“Smile while you can,’ Hettie Close had scrawled in ink almost as faded as the print above it. ‘Smile like the skull you’ll be, you fool, before you’re worse than bones.”
― Ramsey Campbell

“He hurried back. Walls seemed to shift and advance. Right here, it must be. Wasn’t this passage too short? No, it wasn’t a wall that blocked his way, only fog. The fog retreated before him—then at once yielded up a wall. Staggering crimson letters caught in the web of graffiti spelled KILLER.”
― Ramsey Campbell, The Face That Must Die