Holes for Faces by Ramsey Campbell

demanded.
    “We’re just providing the buffet option on this occasion. Chef had to leave us.”
    “Then I haven’t much choice, have I?”
    “We always have while we’re alive.”
    The waiter sounded more priestly than ever, and his pace was deliberate enough for a ritual as he approached the lengthy table that stood along the left side of the room. He uncovered every salver and tureen before extending a hand towards them. “Enough for a large party, sir.”
    When waiters used to say things like that, Todd had expected his uncle to respond with a witticism. The hotel seemed to be turning into a joke Todd didn’t understand. As he crossed the shiny blackened carpet to the buffet, the waiter raised a cloth from an elongated heap at the end of the table and handed him a plate. The buffet offered chicken legs and slices of cold meat, potatoes above which a fog hovered or at least a stagnant cloud of steam, a mound of chips that reminded him of extracting sticks from a haphazard pile in a game for which his aunt had never had the patience. Last came salads, and as he loaded his plate a lettuce leaf attempted a feeble crawl before subsiding on the salver. The movement might have betrayed the presence of an insect, but it was the work of a wind that had moved the floor-length curtain away from a window behind the table as though somebody was lurking there. As a child Todd had somehow been led to believe that God lived behind the curtains above the altar in the church. The curtains on the far side of the table veiled only a vast darkness tossing restlessly as a sleeper in a nightmare. He did his best to ignore the impression while remarking “At least I’m the first one down.”
    “The only one,” the waiter said and found utensils under the cloth for him. “It’s all been put on for you, Mr Todd.”
    Was this meant to shame him into taking more? Todd might have wondered if his fellow guests knew better than to eat at the hotel, but he was more inclined to ask how the waiter knew his name. The man spoke before Todd could. “Will you be having the house?”
    “I’ll try a bottle. Make it red.” In a further attempt to recapture some sense of maintaining control Todd said “And a jug out of the tap.”
    The waiter gave a priestly bow before gliding through a doorway to the left of the buffet, and Todd heard him droning to himself under his breath. Any response was in the same voice, and monotonous enough to suggest that the man was murmuring a ritual. After some sounds of pouring the waiter reappeared with a tray that bore an unstoppered carafe and a jug. He served Todd water and wine and stepped back. “Can you taste it, sir?” he murmured.
    Todd took a mouthful of the wine, which seemed oddly lifeless, like some kind of token drink. “It’ll do,” he said, if only to make the waiter step back.
    The man continued loitering within rather less than arm’s length. He’d clasped his hands together on his chest, which put Todd in mind of someone praying beside a bed. When he tried to concentrate on his meal the hands glimmered so much at the edge of his vision that he might have imagined the gloves were plastic. “I’ll  be fine now,” he said as persuasively as he could.
    The waiter seemed reluctant to part his hands or otherwise move. At last he retreated, so slowly that he might have felt he didn’t exist apart from his job. “Call me if there’s anything you need,” he said as he replaced the covers on the buffet before withdrawing into the inner room. He began murmuring again at once, which made it hard for Todd to breathe. It reminded him too much of the voice he used to hear beyond the doctor’s waiting-room.
    “Go to the doctor’s with your uncle,” his aunt would say, and Todd had never known whether she disliked having him in the house by herself or was providing her husband with company if not distraction, unless it had been her way of making certain that Todd’s uncle saw the doctor yet