Grimm (2 page)

With the arrival of that e-mail, Rory McKenna’s rather odd double life began. He remained an ordinary schoolboy with a football to kick about at break-time, classes to trudge between and homework to puzzle over at the kitchen table. But at the same time his face and voice were about to go global.

It didn’t take long for the filming of adverts to take place. Treated like a filmstar for a week, Rory enjoyed every minute lounging in his seat with his name on the back of it. He decided that he could get quite used to the life; sitting around, watching all the action as harassed people hurried past, barking into mobile phones, while amazing camera equipment was wheeled backwards and forwards. Every now and then someone would come and check he was okay and offer him something to eat or drink. Rory only wished this new lifestyle could be permanent. It certainly beat turning up on a Tuesday morning for double maths followed by cross-country running in the rain. At that stage, Rory could not have known that he would have opted for running extra laps wearing just a pair of pink pants to avoid what was going to happen next.

A period of relative calm followed for a month or two, but then Rory was half-watching TV after school one day when he suddenly appeared on the screen in front of himself, clutching a can of Zizz. It was a tingling, exciting but slightly scary moment and sure enough life changed almost immediately.

“It’s fizzy, it’s light, Zizz has got it right.” The slogan was beginning to haunt him as half the school decided it was hilarious to mimic his line from the advert. It was shouted at him in the corridors by guffawing pupils he didn’t even know, while others like the Goodman twins, Gracie and Gordon, delighted in making up alternatives: “He’s got an ugly face, Ro-ry’s a waste of space.”
It seemed to Rory that he had become their new target. The Goodmans were literally double the trouble of any normal school bully. They worked as a double act, which got them twice the laughs that any one person would.

“What’s McKenna’s USP?” Gracie would shout.

“Ugly Stupid and Pathetic!” Gordon would retort.

Meanwhile, even without the Goodmans’ efforts, the less confident pupils at the school whispered, “That’s him there,” as Rory tried to have a quiet lunch in the dinner hall. He began to spend more time alone as some of his own friends drifted away not wanting to be part of the attention that he now attracted.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.