Who needs eyes when there are things to see like this?

Robbie watched the white hot juice run from the sockets and drizzle like tears down the cheek and chin. All around him the laughter of the Vildegaards and the proud appraisals were echoing like distant thunder. All Robbie could hear was the dim ringing, coming from between his own ears, perhaps. Perhaps really it was the accelerating sound of his own eyes catching fire or unravelling from the retinas. That would be a good thing, he thought.
Honestly who needs eyes when there are things to see like this?
He began to laugh. In that madman, unmoored way someone does in films. He was acting. Actually it was the only response he could think of. He wanted to cry but laughing was better. He looked left, looked right and the elderly mummies on either side shifted away from his uncomfortable reaction.
“It’s cake right?” He asked the room at large. “It’s just a really well done model or or something, right?”
He should never have had to ask such a thing.
No one bothered to answer. Some of them even took pictures.
Robbie’s laughter fell apart when the smell hit him. That overwhelming stench of sweet-sick fat dripping. It was immediately unforgettable. The smell of cooked human being, steamed and seared by an expert. The thing that made Robbie feel his gorge rise up in defiance and horror was that it made his stomach rumble. He hadn’t eaten since the morning and that smell, despite the horrific visage in front of him, made his stomach twist and gurgle in want and need.
Immediately his organs were at civil war.
Stomach– confused and hungry.
Bile– Ready to eject, emptying the stomach of what little remained.
Brain– horrified and grasping for sugary, placating explanations, for lies.
Skin– Revolted and chilled by empathy and horror alike.

He looked across the table, over the heaped, garnished horror, and saw Chef Jon give a simple, imperceptible shake of his head, his eyes full of pleading.
Robbie wanted to help him in whatever he was doing, he really did. He really wanted to, even if he didn’t understand.
But he felt like a horse had kicked him in the gut and he threw up anyway.
Screams and gasps silenced the room, leaving only the sound of Robbie’s retching all over the tablecloth.
One of the chef’s assistants audibly swore and left the room in a hurry.
Baxter Vildegaard’s lab-made veneers vanished under the limp remains of a smile.
Chef looked on in defeat and motionless, powerless fascination. Like watching a car wreck.
Robbie finished puking, and collapsed onto all fours under the table. Partly to hide, partly because in a childish way, it felt safer there.

The Vildegaards all started jabbering at once, outraged.
They were angry, horrified, disgusted.
This staff person, this server, this nobody, had totally ruined their banquet.

It was only when he began hearing the screams of outrage and shock from the banquet that he began to suspect he was using the search as a way to hide from returning. Despite the screams, and the cacophony growing and refusing to slow down from the other side of the wall, Tom kept rummaging through the drawers for the master key, ignoring the sounds. He knew what he was doing, but forcing himself to stand up, turn around and face whatever fresh hell was going on in there was just something he could not do.
He had felt this kind of paralysis many times before, but never during a shift. certainly never on a halloween night shift, during the banquet of the year at the Knifepoint. Of course, this was the worst shift ever. Possibly worse than the one time Chris had broken his leg during service, or when Juan had sneezed into a hotpan, ruining several pounds of calamari.
But was it worse than his first time serving the Vildegaards?
No, not even close. Not yet anyways.

He slammed the chef's drawer, throwing chaos onto his stacks of papers and bills on the desk. Tom stepped back and turned away, pausing in the doorway. There was shouting in the kitchen. He stood there, not quite far enough out of the office to see what the commotion was. Which way should he go? Investigate the voices shouting in the kitchen or attend to the banquet?
He was horrified of what might have gone wrong in the banquet room. But the voices in the kitchen sounded like Chef Donald and some loud mouthed, drunken guest. Pick your poison, Tom. He thoughts grimly. If there had been a third way, leading out of the hotel forever, he'd have taken it. But of course he'd been given too many oppurtunities for that already and turned them all down.

Tom stepped out, and was sandwiched between both disasters. On his left, David was pushing Robbie, who was covered in vomit and hardly able to walk. On Tom's right, Chef Don was holding back that big idiot from the restaurant, the one with the sour expression and bolo tie. Tom jumped back, letting David usher Robbie into the office.
"I'll take care of him," Tom said. "You better see why there's a guest in the kitchen screaming about a raw steak."
David paled, and swallowed audibly. "I was afraid of that. Here, clean him up and hide him somewhere, then get into the banquet and make things better."
"Make things better?" Tom laughed deliriously. "That easy huh? Jesus this is the worst shift ever."
"I'm sorry." Robbie blubbered as David rushed out of the office, slamming the door behind him. Shouting got even worse, just muffled, as David joined the fray in the kitchen. "I threw up all over the table." Robbie squeezed his eyes shut. "That body on the table. It's real isn't it."
It wasn't a question. Tom wondered what the plan had ever been. Was it just to throw the new guy into service and expect he'd be okay with all of this?
What kind of person just accepted serving human meat to monsters for profit? Yes Tom, what kind of person is okay with that?

Tom knelt by Robbie and offered a rag from the stack beside the desk. "It's real. Listen...you were never supposed to deal with all this tonight. Also...it's not supposed to be like that. They put a whole body on the table??"
Robbie nodded, and spoke through the muffled rag. "Like a skewered pig."
"Jesus." Tom felt his own bile rising. It was one thing to serve suspicious cuts of steak with fancy restaurant plating and another thing entirely to put an entire body on the table. "Listen Robbie....This should have been explained to you earlier but...The Vildegaards have a particular kind of taste. A fucked up, cannibalistic one but they don't...kill. They pay good money for us to take the worst people you've ever heard of. Rapists. Pedofiles. Criminally insane murderers....That's what they eat. They feel like they have to eat human flesh...but they eat the worst humans alive."

"And this place helps them."
"Yes. I'm sorry. This is a horrible way to find out. I...wondered if...I knew you didn't know but I thought you suspected. David told me he prepped you."
"Not like this. Not for this. What the fuck man. Is this even real?"
Tom put a hand on his shoulder.
Robbie shrugged it off, nearly falling off the chair in his violent motion. “This isn’t any better Tom. No better than killing people. It’s fucked up…It’s weird.” He dropped the vomit stained rag on the floor and looked Tom straight in the eye for the first time.
“Who kills them?”
Tom shifted in his crouch. “Not us.”
“Who?” Robbie urged.

“We don’t know. The meat…it just arrives in a cooler truck like anything else.”
Robbie stared at Tom, then through him. Tom stood, rubbing his hands uncomfortably.
Robbie shook his head. “The meat…Holy. Fuck. What is this place.” Robbie stood up. “This ain’t worth the money dude.”
Tom stepped in front of him. “Robbie…trust me I know it doesn’t feel like it now but it is. Think of what we’re doing. These monsters get pulled out of prisons where they’re living large on tax dollars and getting a fucking vacation for killing people.” Robbie pushed past Tom and headed for the door. Tom kept talking, unable to stop. ”Some of them, most of them are child killers. We help put them away, forever. It’s….a good thing. It is fucked Up….I admit that. But think of it like retribution.”
“Jesus christ...you actually believe this shit.” Robbie shook his head. "You're all proud of this." He yanked the door open and, refusing to spare Tom another look, left the office.
Tom followed him.

Both were red faced and raw, screaming at each other with their nose tips touching. For Don to lose his anger like that he had to have had all his wires cut. Still, the rest of the line cooks had his back. David was on the phone calling security.
Robbie pushed his way past the crowd and out the battalion doors without anyone noticing.
Tom sighed, and feeling the tug of war telling him to go after the kid, run out of this place together and never look back. Then there was the paycheck that dangled ahead of him, as long as he went back into that banquet hall and sorted out whatever mess Robbie had made.

As he walked down the service hall, he could hear the high class, indignant outrage of the Vildegaards. It sounded like northeastern royalty from the early talking movies, but also like stuck, squealing pigs.

Tom hurried to the doors and took a deep breath before entering.
Chaos, muted. Running out of steam. As pissed as the crowd was, they seemed to be calming down, enough to look for someone to blame. Tom's eyes flashed about the room.
Old wrinkled faces sneering from over there, proud mustachioed faces rippling with rage over here, the sight of Baxter Vildegaard standing across the table from Tom, smiling. The bastard was smiling.
The table settings and cloth and chargers, the glassware and cocktails and still folded napkins looking like tongues stuck out to catch falling. Everything looked lieka goddam bomb had gone off at the center of the table.
It looked like the body laying there, steamed and puckered skin and all, had crashed down from on high.
But of course it hadn't been the body that had the Vildegaards upset. It hadn't been the dead human being on the table, ready for carving.

This....was a new low, even for Tom. In his 20 years at the knifepoint they had served human meat every halloween. But for Tom, by the time it was in his hands, on a platter covered by silver dish topper, it wasn't so bad. By the time the forbidden meat came to Tom all the taboo and smell had been seared and seasoned off. The chefs in the kitchen were hannibal lecters for only one night a year but they put the doctor to shame. The five star quality of the plating, the spices and aromatics and sauces developed here under this roof and unique to the Knifepoint....such elegance and culinary genius hid the truth.
But there it was laid bare, right in front of him.
He could fucking taste the smell on his tongue. He bit his tongue, flooding his mouth with the coppery taste of blood rather than smell that....unreasonably salivating smell.
It wasn't much help in the end.

No wonder Robbie had emptied his guts, and judging by the smell he hadn't been the only one.
Housekeeping staff was already changing the tablecloth, scooting it out from under the body as if it weren't there. They were avoiding looking at it.
At him.
Him. They were avoiding looking at him. The body on the table was a man, it was obvious, as shriveled and unnatural as it looked after being steamed in the hotbox for so long.

Tom realized he'd been standing in place for too long. He'd been as shocked and helpless as the vildegaards and that wouldn't earn him back into their favor, no sir.
"Mr Vildegaard!" Tom burst into motion, that old perpetual machine within him having its chain yanked one more time. He scrambled over a knocked over chair, a shattered glass, and an appetizer dish --calamari looked like.
"Sir!" Tom said again, slowing as he got to Baxter. "We're going to make this right, we're going to make this better for you, trust me. Anyway I can divert this disaster and put us back on good holiday cheer I--"
"You can Tom. You can, rest assured." Baxter flashed his cheshire veneers. He put a decrepit hand on tom's shoulder and floundered for grip, then seized and Tom found his clutch to be rather tight and uncomfortable. "I must admit....I pushed things. I allowed...a mistake to happen. It's your responsibility of course, to make this event run without a hitch but I could hardly expect you to recover from the new boy ruining everything. It was I who had him in here, entertaining us." Baxter chuckled. "You should have seen his face, warring with himself...telling himself it wasn't real, that he could doubt his eyes and ears..." Baxter wheezed he laughed so hard. "It was almost worth having him ruin dinner."
Tom, on the other side of the table now, looked at the "dinner" on the table, he couldn't help it.
The limbs twisted into fetal position and trussed that way with wire.
The eyeless sockets running with cooling fat and the mouth...
the mouth was open in a yowling O and pulled back like the emaciated lips of a mummy.
And there was vomit in chunks all over the tablecloth.

Tom looked away, so fast his neck actually popped. Somehow, the only sight to fix his gaze on and steady himself was the foul smile of Baxter Vildegaard and his marbled teeth. Baxter put hands on his shoulder again, shaking him like a coach before a big match.
"It's different than most years eh?" Baxter looked over at the table, longingly. Tom was locked onto the middle distance. "This year I've grown...bored. My palate craves one kind of dish and one only and it gets hard after so long to iterate and invent. One thing we haven't tried is...close to raw as we can get."
Tom swallowed his bile. Baxter patted him on the shoulder then the cheek. "Following FDA food safety guidelines of course, wouldn't want to put this wonderful place in danger of course." He chuckled.

Tom honestly couldn't tell if the man was joking.
"Listen Tom, Here's how we make this right. I've called our delivery man, and he's coming in with a special delivery. The freshest meal we've had in ages. I specially requested it from Chef. Run downstairs and fetch it for us in oh...should be twelve minutes now." Baxter shook his wrist watch free of his sleeve. "Yes. See you in twenty? I'm taking the family over to the bar for drinks while the banquet hall gets cleaned up."

Baxter turned away and clapped his hands. He began shouting in a somehow still calm and authoritative voice and the crowd of shocked, revolted Vildegaards young and old all began marching out the doors to the bar, presumably.
Baxter turned back to Tom and stuffed something green and papery into his pocket. "Don't let us down again, right Thomas?" He left following after his family.

Tom didn't bother checking his pocket, he just shoved the bills deeper and left the room as fast as he could.
After all, he had to get the replacement main course.