Grimm

by Mike Nicholson

  Even outside school, Rory attracted comments from passers by. PC Malky Mackay stopped his bike one day and asked him with a deadpan expression if he felt that he needed police protection. “I’ll give it to you in return for an autograph,” the lanky policeman had shouted after him.

  Rory couldn’t quite believe that his desire to avoid fuss by omitting to say that the slogan was someone else’s, was now causing such complications in his life.

  The real change for Rory came when Zizz announced their sales figures. Previously a relatively small player in the soft drinks world, Zizz had suddenly shot right up the charts like bubbles to the top of an opened bottle. They gave full credit for this sharp rise in sales to their new advertising campaign and to “the Zizz Boy,” as Rory was now being called. As time went on, Rory began to realize that he had become the drink’s unique selling point. He was sure that the slogan on its own would only have created half of the success, but with him in tow, there was an added human interest story.

  Soon, the Business Pages section of almost every broadsheet paper covered the fact that Zizz’s triumph as the top-selling drink had arisen out of a chance conversation between its Chief Executive Officer and an eleven-year-old boy. After that, the Sunday supplements picked up on the story and Mr McKenna had even more excuse to spend his time behind newspapers. Interest soon spread further afield as Blue Peter asked Rory to launch a competition to come up with a new slogan for the programme. Gracie and Gordon Goodman sparked off a new craze after that, of mimicking the Blue Peter music any time Rory passed by. Sometimes it was like the whole stairwell of the school was ringing with it as everyone joined in, much to the delight of the twins, whose sniping nasty laughs you could not tell apart.

  Despite all of the national newspaper interest, Aberfintry’s local paper The Chronicle, was very slow off the mark, eventually running an article entitled “Fizz Ahoy! Our Local Zizz Boy!” Rory had never met anyone from the paper although he knew that it was the Goodman twins’ father, Derek, who wrote and edited the weekly publication. The article about him seemed to have been pieced together using information from everything else that had been published so far, along with quotes from people in the town who claimed to know Rory well, but who he had no recollection of meeting. The Chronicle also highlighted the fact that as the youngest ever recipient of an international marketing award, Rory could be following in the footsteps of Aberfintry’s much-loved and much-missed Lachlan Stagg, who had been famous for amassing his own horde of wildly different world records.

  After the publicity came the offers. All sorts of opportunities to endorse other products began to arrive as Rory was offered money to help in advertising everything from fishfingers to toilet paper. Even some of the rival drinks companies wanted to film him with their can in his hand saying, “Do you know what? I’ve changed my mind. This one’s better.”

  Rory knew that things had gone completely mad when a suggestion came in to turn the slogan into a ringtone and a draft contract appeared offering the chance to record a song called “Merry Zizzmas,” to try to get a Christmas number 1.

  “I mean, have you ever heard me sing?” said Rory despairingly, as he shuffled through another selection of envelopes containing random offers of work at the end of a normal school day.

  “Mmmmm,” said his Dad lowering the paper for a rare moment. “I might draft a rival contract offering you the chance not to make a record.”

  Also arriving thick and fast were requests for Rory’s expertise. Lots of companies now saw Rory as the marketing wizard who had cracked the challenge for Zizz and they wanted to recruit him to do the same for them. Their letters made clear the high regard that Rory was now held in:

  “Your impact on Zizz has impressed us greatly …”

  “We believe you can help us with the challenge of positioning our product better in the marketplace …”

  Rory soon yearned for a normal quiet life, but this was proving a bit difficult for the boy who now had his very own post van delivery every day.

  His desire for anonymity was also because his so-called “marketing genius” — the phrase used in any article that featured him — was based on him having overheard someone else. Call it a niggle or a prick of conscience, but the success didn’t sit comfortably with Rory and he still waited for the day when the skipping girl from the café would re-appear saying “that’s my song … you nicked it.”

  Rory decided that the best he could do was to quietly let the Zizz campaign run its course. As a result, he gave polite refusals to each of the requests that came in and developed the response that “he wasn’t taking on any new clients at the moment.” In the back of his mind he was pretty sure he would never do another marketing job. He reckoned that the safest approach was for Zizz to be a one-off and for early retirement to be as far as his marketing career would go.

  And then the letter arrived.

  Twinkle twinkle Hotel Grimm

  Wish your lights would just go dim

  Up above us in the town

  Always feel you’re looking down

  Twinkle twinkle Hotel Grimm

  Wish your lights would just go dim

  Children’s Song

  5. The impossible challenge

  Poised to crumple it up and throw it away, Rory forced himself to look at the letter one last time. The top of the page had the same snarling wolf’s head emblem as the now-broken seal from the envelope. The spidery script seemed to have been scratched onto the paper by a sputtering fountain pen.

  Granville Grimm looks forward to receiving Mr Rory McKenna for a meeting at Hotel Grimm on Saturday 1st June at 10.30am precisely. The project for discussion is “Rebranding Hotel Grimm,” which Mr McKenna has been chosen to manage.

  Rebranding Hotel Grimm? he thought shaking his head for the umpteenth time. He had given up groaning about it because his throat was getting too sore from doing so. How could anyone successfully come up with a new name and image for something as unspeakably awful and downright dangerous as Hotel Grimm?

  As far as Rory could recall, anyone who had ever stayed there in his lifetime had emerged in a coffin-shaped box, or gone on to die a horrible death elsewhere.

  All in all, a delightful place for a holiday, he thought. How would you advertise that?

  Need to get to your grave that little bit faster? Come and stay at Hotel Grimm!

  Ever wanted to disappear and not come back? Try our 2 nights for the price of 1 Special Vanishing Deals!

  Whilst the challenge of rebranding Scrab Hill’s notorious establishment was a major concern in itself, what presented Rory with his biggest worry was another phrase in the letter.

  “… Mr McKenna has been chosen to manage.”

  What do they mean by “has been chosen?” thought Rory, breaking out in an uncontrollable hot sweat. Surely it’s up to me to choose who I work with … or not? he despaired.

  In the back of his mind, however, Rory knew that this was not the way that things worked with Hotel Grimm. Not only did the place spoil the view like a carbuncle on the landscape, but it cast a shadow over the town in a much more sinister way. The hotel’s disastrous record on looking after its guests in recent years, meant that it had become the neighbour that no Aberfintry resident wanted anything to do with.

  Given recent stories, Rory knew without a doubt that everyone in the town would agree at the moment, that the only thing worse than going to a meeting at Hotel Grimm would be the possible consequences of not going. The latest edition of The Chronicle said it all. Rory could picture it lying on the coffee table downstairs. “Say “No!” at Your Peril!” screamed the headline as the story went on to explain that strange and awful things had happened in the last week to two of Aberfintry’s tradesmen, who had recently turned down work at Hotel Grimm.

  Experienced electrician Willie Docherty, remains in hospital after connecting a doorbell to the streetlamp grid. “It happened within minutes of me posting Granville Grimm a note to say I wasn’t interested in
rewiring his freaky hotel,” said Willie from his hospital bed. Meanwhile painter and decorator Scott McAndrew, in the bed next to Willie, has just survived being crushed under eighty rolls of wallpaper, which avalanched out of his van. “I was asked to quote a price for decorating that dump and I told them I wasn’t interested,” said Scott. “I went round to the back of the van and the next thing I knew I was buried under half a ton of paper. That place is pure evil.”

  Based on the two mens’ stories, The Chronicle had reached its own conclusion.

  Woe betide the next person to turn down a request to do something there. All you can hope for is that your line of business is not what they need next, up at Hotel Death.

  Rory reckoned if he turned down the appointment then he might as well put in a call to the hospital now to tell the nurses to start turning down the sheets and fluffing up the pillows on the bed next to Willie and Scott, in preparation for his arrival. Just as the wording in the letter suggested, there was really no choice for him.

  Rory knew that there were numerous other stories attached to the hotel in the past, and he decided to hunt around the house for some back issues of The Chronicle so that he could check them out. He wanted to remind himself of the detail, even though part of him dreaded doing so. Checking with his Mum she waved a vague hand and told him that the old newspapers were all in the kitchen. Unfortunately, it turned out that this was because everything that had once been a newspaper in the house had been used for a papier mâché project of Momo’s, and anything that might have given him a useful insight into some of the hotel’s recent deeds, had been pulped, shaped, dried and painted and was now hanging in a selection of randomly shaped objects on the pulley. The only copy of The Chronicle he could find was an ancient one that his Dad’s wellies sat on in the shed. Peering between the muddy stains, he managed to make out a story of a Council meeting that Granville Grimm left in “a foul mood, unhappy about the attitude of councillors to his views on the town’s mural”. The next day, lightning had struck the Council building resulting in a fire in the room where the meeting had been held. The Chronicle concluded that Hotel Grimm’s owner appeared to have unnatural powers and was prepared to use them in unpleasant ways.

  Try as he might to think of a way of avoiding the appointment he had been given, Rory couldn’t come up with one. The thought of what might befall him if he did, seemed to always get in the way. As the inevitability of having to go to Hotel Grimm sank in, something else dawned on Rory.

  “It’s a punishment!” he said out loud. “Just because I never gave that girl any credit.”

  Trying to remain positive, he reckoned that he could at least get ready for the meeting about rebranding Hotel Grimm; his best hope being to go there and politely decline their invitation.

  Did you mean: hotel grimm

  No standard web pages containing all your search items were found.

  Search engine message

  6. Too many dead guests

  The first stage of Rory’s preparations involved undertaking some background research and he turned to his computer to see what the Internet could offer. He soon found that there was disappointingly little about Hotel Grimm. It was almost as though the search engines refused to handle the name or produce any results. The main reference he did track down was on a website that listed all of the known cable cars in the world. It provided a potted history on where Scrab Hill’s own machine had appeared from.

  Rory learned that, on returning from the war in 1946 with too many ideas and a large inheritance to spend, Sir Gregory Grimm had set to work having the contraption built that still stood to this day. Within the history of the cable car, there was also a report of a mini avalanche in 1989 on Scrab Hill that had buried three children and their dog while they were out sledging one January afternoon. The unusual movement of the snow that had left the group trapped up to their necks had been blamed on the quivering pylons of the cable car. Given that the cable car had such a strong connection with the Hotel, the finger of blame was pointed at the establishment for nearly taking the lives of some of the town’s youngsters.

  Rory’s Internet search also revealed the obituary of hotel critic, Katy Cribb, who on the day her review of Hotel Grimm was published in 2007, had choked on a chunk of aubergine and died at the very next place she visited. Her review had been scathing to say the least:

  I use the word “dump” advisedly as that appears to be excessively complimentary. If our magazine had a way of awarding minus scores … Hotel Grimm would surely deserve them all. It is a catastrophically bad experience to cross the threshold, let alone brave staying the night there.

  Katy Cribb would now review no more and it seemed that the hotel had somehow managed to serve its own rather extreme judgment on her opinion of it, even after she had left the premises.

  Other than that, the best that Rory had got from an hour or two of searching were enough references to suggest that The Chronicle’s archive located in Aberfintry’s library, might provide the best source of information. He also found reference to one book on the hotel. The locally-produced publication was about Hotel Grimm’s statues and stone carvings and had been written by Lachlan Stagg. Rory knew that the unfortunate author, who was now missing presumed dead, had been Aberfintry’s best attempt at having a local celebrity, before his own Zizz-inspired appearance. Stagg’s efforts at gaining as many world records as he could, had given the town much entertainment over the years and helped to put it on the map.

  Realizing that newspapers and books needed to be the next port of call, Rory decided to make a journey to the library, although this in itself presented something of a challenge. Given the choice, he tended to spend time playing on his computer or kicking a ball around rather than putting any effort into deciding what to read, let alone ploughing through a book itself. At best, Rory dipped into a few comics, so as he approached the library at the end of a school day, he felt like a fish about to head out of the water. It didn’t help to bump into Marnie di Angelo, one of Gracie Goodman’s friends as he reached the door.

  “Zizz Boy?” she said with a raised eyebrow. “Fancy seeing you here. Just here to read about yourself in the magazines are you?”

  Rory mumbled something in response, feeling like a giant spotlight had just been turned on him, and that anyone inside would be staring at him. The only familiar person that Rory spotted, was Bonnie O’Donnell. Thanks to Gordon and Gracie Goodman, Bonnie was known to the whole school as the Worm, short for the Bookworm, as she could usually be found reading in the corner of the playground, so it was no surprise to Rory to find her in here. One of the assistants was lifting down a book for her from a high shelf as Bonnie was unable to reach from her wheelchair.

  “You look a little lost. Can I help you?” said the woman behind the front desk looking up from a pile of books that she was sorting. Her badge said “Mrs Trinder-Kerr. Librarian. Happy to Help.”

  “Er yes, I need some reference books please,” said Rory.

  “The reference section is up at the back on the left,” said Mrs Trinder-Kerr pointing to the far corner. “Anything in particular that you’re after?”

  “I’m doing a little local history project,” said Rory, trying hard to remain as vague as he could.

  “Well, that narrows it down a bit,” said Mrs Trinder-Kerr coming out from behind the desk. “We’ve got a few books on the area. What is it you are trying to find out?”

  Rory hesitated. “Well … er … actually … I was wondering what you have on Hotel Grimm?”

  Mrs Trinder-Kerr’s helpful face froze momentarily. “We have some information … I don’t often get asked for it,” she added, looking strangely at Rory.

  “No, I expect not,” said Rory deciding not to broadcast the reasons for his research.

  Without another word and with a great deal of haste Mrs Trinder-Kerr found him what he was looking for. Returning to her desk, she promptly knocked over the pile of books which she had been sorting and glared across the libra
ry at Rory as if implying that he had something to do with her sudden clumsiness. Rory was aware that Bonnie O’Donnell had glanced over at him, but he kept his head lowered and settled himself as best he could at a large table. As he did so, he realized to his embarrassment that the seat he’d chosen was right beside a large poster for his Mum’s current exhibition. Rory could hardly look at the title proclaiming “Kitchen Utensils and the Meaning of Life.” The picture showed the piece that he knew Momo to be most excited about; it was a metal sieve, entitled “Metal Sieve.”

  “Why can’t she just paint some pictures like proper artists?” his Grandad had asked during one of their regular cups of tea together.

  “It’s contemporary art,” Rory had said, finding himself in the odd position of defending the creative efforts of his mother, which often left him bemused.

  “I’m sure your Gran bought her that sieve,” said Grandad. “Does that mean there will be some royalties coming my way?”

  “Not sure,” Rory had said. “I think your claim has a few holes in it.” The memory of his awful joke failed to raise a smile as with a mixture of nervousness and curiosity he prepared to leaf through the material Mrs Trinder-Kerr had found for him. The archive took the form of a giant album containing a century’s worth of press cuttings from Aberfintry’s local paper The Chronicle. The front of each issue from the past twenty years sported the name of Derek Goodman, the owner and editor, as well as Gracie and Gordon’s dad. He was responsible for the stories about the town, a large proportion of which seemed to be about Hotel Grimm. Prior to that, the name on the articles changed to Hunter Goodman and Sidney Goodman before that. The Chronicle had been a family business stretching back through the twentieth century.