Free Holes for Faces by Ramsey Campbell Page B

several pans in the kitchen. As he changed into his dark suit—the only one he’d brought—a phone rang.
    At first he thought it was in the next room. It shrilled at least a dozen times before he traced the dusty wire from the skirting board to the upper compartment of the wardrobe. When he swung the door open, the receiver toppled off the hook, starting to speak as he fumbled it towards his face. “The gong’s gone, Mr Todd.”
    The receptionist’s tone seemed capable of stripping Todd of all the years since his last visit. “Oh, is that what it was?” he retorted. “I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”
    He would have liked to shower and shave, but the hotel could take the blame, even if the man in the black frame of the mirror would never have passed his aunt’s inspection. Todd had always felt on probation, never quite knowing if his visits were treats or punishments. “If you won’t behave you can go to your aunt’s,” his mother used to say, and he’d suspected she was a little afraid of her older sister. His uncle hadn’t seemed to be, and made a joke wherever he could find one, but then he’d done so at the surgery as well. Todd didn’t need to be alone with those memories, and hurried out of the room.
    If he’d been able to locate the stairs he would have used them, but the corridor offered him just the silent doors, bearing numbers like steps in a child’s first arithmetic lesson. He was close to hearing them chanted in his skull. He stepped gingerly down into the lift and pushed the marble button, only to leave a blotchy print on it. He hadn’t even washed his hands. “Not my fault,” he muttered, feeling threatened by a second childhood.
    The lobby was deserted except for a sign on a stand outside a room Todd hadn’t previously noticed. The plastic numbers separated by a hyphen weren’t years, they were hours with just sixty minutes between them. The words above them would have said DINING ROOM if they hadn’t lost a letter. Todd found the N on the carpet in the doorway—carpet trampled as flat and black as soil. As he attempted to replace the letter between the I and its twin he felt as if he were playing an infantile game. He hadn’t succeeded when he grew aware of being watched from the room beyond the sign. “Just putting you together,” he said.
    The waiter was dressed even more sombrely than Todd. He stepped back a silent pace and indicated the room with a sweep of one white-gloved hand. The room was nowhere near as daunting as Todd recalled. While the tables were still draped like altars, and the place was certainly as hushed as a church, it was scarcely big enough for a chapel. Even if it had always sported chandeliers, he didn’t remember them as being so ineffectual. He had to squint to be sure of the burly waiter’s small sharp face, the eyes narrowed as though in need of spectacles, the brow that he could have imagined had been tugged unnaturally smooth by the removal of a wig from the clipped grey hair. He was disconcerted enough to blurt “Has your sister gone off?”
    The waiter paced to the farthest table and drew back its solitary chair. “Who was that, sir?”
    His voice was as unctuously slow as a priest’s at a pulpit, and might have been striving for hoarseness and depth. “Aren’t you related to the lady at reception?” Todd said.
    “They say we’re all related, don’t they?” Before Todd could give this whatever response it deserved, the waiter said “Will you be taking the buffet?”
    Todd sat down as the waiter slipped the chilly leather seat beneath him. “Can I see the menu?” he said.
    He never had while he was visiting—he’d only watched his aunt and uncle leafing through leather-bound volumes and then ordering for him. “I wouldn’t recommend it, sir,” the waiter said.
    Todd was starting to feel as he’d felt as a child—that everyone around him knew a secret he wouldn’t learn until he was older. “Why not?” he