Help! My Brother's a Zombie! (4 page)

There is absolutely no
way
I could sleep after that story.

I can still hear the clinking from the attic …

The only way to stop the shivers is to hear another tale.

So who's next?

Dublin UNESCO City of Literature

Hey there, all you dead smart readers of my deadly books!

My demon publishers tell me I have to explain this competition thingy to you. So that you can go on their miserable website

www.littleisland.ie

and enter their crumby competition and WIN some gloomy prize or other. A Meeting with Cake, I believe, in their stupid publishing house. (In Glasnevin, we call that a party, but these southsiders have to call it a Meeting with Cake.) But hey, cake is always good, even if you do have to meet a few crumbly publishers and a few dotty writers to get it, so here goes.

Listen up, now, if you like cake and can read …

Right, so there are twelve clues in total, hidden inside my four wonderful Nightmare Club books, and what you are looking for are Dublin place names. So, for example, there might be (there isn't but there might be, it's just an example) … there might be a character called O'Connell. And you would say, ‘Hey, O'Connell Street, that's a place in Dublin.'

That is how you solve the clues. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Only they are not as OBVIOUS as O'Connell Street, obviously.

So then when you have solved all the clues, you merry sleuths, you log on to
www.littleisland.ie
and you go to the page called Nightmare Club Competition and you get this form thingy and you write in the answers. That's how you get the cake. Or at least, that's how you get invited to the Meeting with Cake (or party, if you are from Glasnevin).

Twelve unlucky winners will be invited to the cake thingy, and one of the twelve, the unluckiest of all, will also win a book token for a million pounds. (Hah! There aren't any pounds any more, that was a joke.) I mean, a whole lot of euro. (But not a million. Come on,
they are little tiny publishers, not international bankers.)

OK, so watch out for the street names and place names, all in Dublin, as you read the story, and write them down. And then get the next book and do the same. And the next, and the next. They are all called The Nightmare Club (books 1 to 4) and I wrote them. That's how you know which ones to get - clever, eh? Dead clever.

Your friend,
Annie Graves

PS: Not everyone who gets all twelve right can have the cake thingy; there isn't enough room and there isn't enough cake, so if more than twelve of yous get it right, there will have to be a raffle. OK?

PPS: The last day for entering the competition is The Last Day. Of 2011. Easy date to remember: the last day is the last day.

If you are reading this AFTER the last day of 2011, you'll have to check out the website to see if there is another competition you can enter.