Grimm by Mike Nicholson Read Free Book Online Page B

pricked up. He could hear a whistling draught, an occasional drip, a distant hinge creaking and what sounded horribly like the pattering of a small animal’s feet. Rory shook his head sharply as if to dispel the sounds and the images they were creating in his mind. At the same time, the smell of damp made his nose wrinkle uncontrollably.
    “Hurry up!” barked the rude little man. His shadowy figure was fast disappearing down the dim hallway. Frightened of being left on his own, Rory set off.
    But on his first step, something squidged under his foot. He recoiled as he walked on, desperately trying not to think of what it might have been.
    There were enough coughs ahead to let Rory know that he was still heading in the right direction, and as he rounded a corner in haste, he thumped straight into the man who was now standing wheezing against a doorpost.
    “Oof … sorry,” spluttered Rory.
    “ HOO HA !” The noise erupted right beside him as the man cleared his throat and nose at the same time with the sound of a dredger scraping the life out of the bottom of a pond. Rory’s stomach churned as he remembered standing in something a few moments before.
    As the man grunted and limped off again, Rory couldn’t help but think that any potential guest at Hotel Grimm would already have turned round, headed off at top speed and made alternative arrangements for the night. Occasionally, the man jerked round and managed to seem annoyed to find Rory still there, at the same time as telling him to hurry up. Rory quickly got the impression that there was little that he would be able to do right in the grumpy man’s eyes.
    After a maze of twisting and turning corridors, Rory was ushered into a cavernous room, poorly lit by a couple of meagre bulbs that failed to cast light into the far corners. Rory decided that he probably didn’t want to see into them anyway for fear of what might be lurking there.
    All around the room, dark wood panelling covered the walls, while once gilt-framed gloomy portraits of even gloomier-looking men frowned down from all around. Only the whites of their eyes and their starched collars provided the slightest suggestion of light in each picture.
    Velvet curtains hung limply at every window, some in tatters, which Rory concluded was probably due to the flock of giant moths that was fluttering around, looking as though they might have been feeding on the fabric for generations.
    Had it been blazing, a fire under the enormous mantlepiece would have brought life and light to the room. Instead a few unconvincing embers glowed feebly as if about to give up the ghost.
    “Sit there!” barked the man, shoving Rory towards a giant high-backed throne-like seat at one end of a table so enormously long that it seemed a plane could land on it.
    A gigantic candelabra like a twisted tree was topped by three yellowing candles which were now unlit. Wax had dribbled and hardened to form a fantastic sculpture over time, which in the half-lightresembled a hand pointing back out of the door, suggesting the quickest escape route.
    Rory had the sensation that he was being silently laughed at by the manically laughing faces carved into the wooden back of his seat. It was only after gazing round the room that he realized that a brooding figure was seated in silence at the distant end of the table. Rory made out a furrowed forehead, topped with wild, unruly hair. The man sat motionless apart from the slow movement of one finger twizzling a particularly long lock of hair around and around and around.
    As if a bit had been formed from the rocky side of Scrab Hill, the man’s face appeared solid, craggy and expressionless. Rory could make out few other features.
    “Good morning and thank you for coming.”
    The soft and polite voice which emerged from the hulking figure made Rory double-take to check where the sound had actually come from.
    “Er … no problem,” he said, caught off guard.
No problem? No problem?
his own