Free Holes for Faces by Ramsey Campbell Page A

the print was almost too indistinct to read. Method of payment, onward destination, next of kin… “That’s a blank, I’m afraid,” Todd said. He scrawled his signature, in which age had reduced the first name to resembling Jab, and unstuck his discoloured fingers from the pen while the receptionist pored over the form.
    He’d had more than enough of the sight of her greyish scalp through her irregular parting—it put him in mind of a crack in weedy stone—by the time she raised her head. “Retired from what?” she apparently felt entitled to learn.
    “Education.” When this didn’t lessen her scrutiny Todd added “Teaching them their sums.”
    This failed to earn him even a blink. “Will you be dressing?” she said.
    “For dinner, you mean?” She’d begun to remind him of his aunt, who had always found some element of his appearance to improve—a collar to tug higher on his neck, a tie to yank tighter, a handkerchief that was either lying too low in his breast pocket or standing too impolitely erect. “I’ll  be changing,” he said.
    “Better look alive, then. It’s nearly eight, you know.”
    “Nowhere near,” said Todd, shaking the cuff of his heavy sweater back from his thin wrist. He was about to brandish the time—not much after half past five—when he saw his watch had stopped. His aunt and uncle had sent it for his twenty-first, and it had never let him down before. He drew his cuff over its battered face and found the receptionist frowning at him as if he’d betrayed some innumeracy. “Let’s have my key, then,” he said, “and I’ll be down as soon as I’m fit to kill.”
    Whenever she’d finished sprucing him Todd’s aunt used to say that was how he was dressed, but perhaps the receptionist didn’t know the phrase. “You’re number one,” she informed him, planting the brass club on the counter with a blow like the stroke of a hammer. “You’ll have to work the lift yourself.”
    Todd couldn’t tell whether she was apologising for the attendant’s absence or reminiscing about the hotel’s better days. As he headed for the  gloomy alcove that housed the entrance to the single lift, a wheel of his suitcase dislodged a loose tile. The receptionist watched with disfavour while he replaced it in its gritty niche, and he didn’t linger over deciphering the blurred letters on the underside of the tile—presumably some firm’s trademark. Once he dragged open both latticed doors of the lift he struggled over shutting them. The wall of the lift shaft inched past the rusty mesh, and at last the floor of a grudgingly illuminated corridor sank into view, although the lift fell short of aligning with it. Todd had to clamber up and haul his suitcase after him before he could make for his room.
    It was at the far end of the left-hand stretch of corridor, where a window above a fire escape showed the town reduced to runny mud by the rain on the glass. The feeble lamps on the corridor walls resembled glazed flames, all the more by flickering. The number on Todd’s door was dangling head down from its one remaining screw. He twisted the key in the aged shaky lock and pushed the leaden door open, to be met by a smell of old fabric. It made Todd feel enclosed, invisibly and impalpably but oppressively, even after he switched on the miniature chandelier.
    The small room was darkened by the furniture—a black wardrobe with a full-length mirror in its narrow door, an ebony dressing-table, a squat chest of drawers that looked stunted by age, a bed that wasn’t quite single or double, with a hint of an indentation underneath a shaggy blanket as brown as turned earth. A door led to a shower and toilet, while another would have communicated with the next bedroom but was blocked by a luggage stand. Behind the heavy curtains at the foot of the bed Todd found a window that showed him darkness raging above the moor. He was unpacking his case when he heard what could have been the fall of