Harry the Poisonous Centipede Goes to Sea Read online

  “No,” she said. “I don’t like eating things that have been alive, it makes me feel a bit sick, so I eat lots of different tree-droppings.”

  “Wait a minute. You don’t mean you never eat ordinary things?”

  “No. Just tree-droppings,” she said demurely.

  There was a silence.

  “Hx, she’s a no-meat-feeder,” crackled George under his breath.

  A centipede that didn’t like meat and wouldn’t stop anything! They waved their feelers at Josie as if she were not completely centipede.

  “Please don’t feeler me like that,” she said. “It’s rather rude.”

  “Oh! Sorry,” said George at once. “It’s just – I’ve never met a no-meat-feeder before. What kind of – er – tree-droppings do you like best? I’ve never really bothered to try any.”

  “There are so many different kinds!” Josie said eagerly. “One never gets to the end of them!”

  “Weird,” crackled George. Harry nudged him with a bump of his middle section.

  “I don’t think it’s weird,” said Harry. “It’s interesting. At least you won’t be hungry in here with all these yellow-curves. I wish I liked them.”

  “Try one,” said Josie.

  To oblige her, Harry bent his head and took a bite.

  “Ugh!” he said. “It’s horrible!”

  Josie gave a centipedish laugh by shaking all her segments up and down. “No, no, not the outside! You have to get through to the soft, sweet stuff inside.” She caught a ridge of the yellow skin between her poison-claws and neatly stripped it back. “Now try again,” she said.

  George backed away. But Harry nibbled a little of the soft white stuff, and then a little more. “H’m. It’s not bad, I must say. Soft as worms. But not a bit like them to taste.”

  Josie shuddered daintily. “I couldn’t bear to eat a worm!” she said.

  Before any more could be crackled, the jiggling movement stopped. The three of them dashed along a bridge of bananas to the long opening again and stuck their heads out.

  “Smell that, Grndd! You know what that is, don’t you?” Harry said in shocked tones.

  “Yeah, I’m afraid I do,” said George. “It’s the no-end puddle.”

  “The no-end puddle? What’s that?” asked Josie.

  “It’s water,” said Harry. “Water and water and water, more than you’d ever think there could be. It goes on and on for ever – that’s why it’s called no-end. It’s not even water you can drink, either.”

  “Can you swim?” George asked Josie abruptly.

  “Swim? You mean, like marine centipedes do?”

  “Except they don’t,” said George. “But I can, and so can Harry, and if by any horrible chance we’re going to get dropped in the no-end puddle, like we once were, you’re going to have to learn to swim very fast indeed.”

  Poor Josie crouched down on her banana and put out signals of fear. “I can’t, I know I can’t!” she waickled (you know – a wailing crackle.) “If I’m dropped in the no-end puddle, I’ll stop!”

  Both the centeens rushed to her side.

  “No, you won’t,” they both said. “You won’t, because we’re here, and we’ll look after you!” And then they looked at each other across her cuticle, and their feelers stuck up straight, which meant, “Why are you crackling that to her? I’m crackling that to her!”

  Oh, dear. Centeenas. They can cause trouble even when they don’t mean to. It’s not their fault, of course.

  And just in case you were wondering what did happen to the head, since Josie hadn’t eaten it…Well, I’m sorry to tell you that another tarantula had sneaked up through the bananas, and grabbed it. Not very nice, tarantulas.

  In fact, the word ‘cannibal’ comes to mind.

  4. Centeens at Sea

  Quite a long time passed. The three centeens crouched together amid the yellow-curves and tried to keep their centi-spirits up by sending each other hopeful signals. Then the straight-up-hard-thing began to move again.

  This time it moved sharply upward and then sideways. What was happening was that they were being swung through the air on the end of a crane, to be loaded aboard a ship. But they didn’t know that. When they poked their heads out of the long hole and looked down, they couldn’t make out anything underneath them. They were too high up.

  All they knew was that there was a big bump, which made everything in the crate jump, and then there was no more bright light. That was a relief to them. There were a lot of vibrations and loud noises and after a while it got really dark (that was when the hatches went on up on deck.) The centeens looked and feelered about them.

  “Well, here we are – wherever we are,” said George, quite cheerfully. “At least we’re not going to drown.”

  “But what is going to happen?” asked Josie fearfully.

  “Who knows?” said George. “It’s a real adventure, anyway!”

  Harry didn’t say anything. He was thinking it was too much of an adventure for his taste, and that Belinda would be worried sick. She was old and it wasn’t right to leave her like this. He looked at Josie, who was huddled up small at his side. “Do you want an adventure?” he asked her.

  “I want my basket,” she crackled faintly. Not many centeens even remember that their mothers once kept them in special little containers like baskets when they first came out of their eggs, but “I want my basket” is still what they say when they’re feeling miserable and homesick and scared.

  Harry was just going to crackle something comforting when George came over and boldly twisted his feelers around Josie’s.

  “Don’t you worry, Jgn. I’m right beside you. I won’t let anything bad happen.”

  She rubbed her head against his gratefully. “Thank you, Grndd,” she said. Harry lifted one feeler quizzically, and George saw it and looked away. He knew it meant, “Promises, promises.” George couldn’t really stop anything bad happening and George knew Harry knew that, but Josie didn’t know, and Harry wasn’t mean enough to tell her.

  At last a different movement began. It was a sort of slow rocking and swaying, and it went on and on. Sometimes it was a very strong, frightening movement that threw them about and had them slipping and sliding among the bananas. Sometimes it was quite gentle. They got used to it, and began to think of their nest in the yellow-curves as a sort of home from home.

  The worst thing by far was the cold. They weren’t used to being cold and they had no defence against it. Luckily for them, this wasn’t a refrigeration ship – you can’t freeze bananas – but the hold was kept chilled to keep the fruit fresh on its journey, and this was very hard on the centeens. They had to keep moving about as much as possible. As for keeping damp, this was a major problem too.

  What they did in the end was venture out of the crate and explore the hold of the ship until they came to a crate that held potatoes. Potatoes are generally stored and shipped with earth around them. Earth is damp, and this was how the centeens managed not to Dry Out. But there weren’t many living creatures in the dirt, so they had to keep returning to their original straight-up-hard-thing to find food.

  There was no shortage for any of them. Quite a lot of creatures had found their way into the crate along with the bananas, including the second tarantula. Before the voyage ended, most of them had ended, too.

  Josie happily ate banana. She wouldn’t be tempted by any of the spiders, beetles or even a small and very tasty snake that the others brought her.

  “No, really. I couldn’t,” she would say, humping her mid-sections in polite disgust, and turning her head away. “I’ll just eat my nice yellow-curve, thank you.”

  “Aren’t you getting bored with it?” asked Harry after three nights and days.

  “Yes, but it doesn’t matter,” she said. “No-meat-feeders like us must not make a fuss.” This is a direct quote from Beetle, a language that always rhymes. If any Hoo-Min vegetarians among you would like to use it – please, be my guest.

  “All
the more for us then,” said George, who was a bit hurt that she didn’t like anything he brought her.

  But despite Josie’s no-meat-feeder-ism, they liked her. And she liked them. As time passed, they crackled a lot to each other. Harry and George told Josie their adventures, and she told them some that she’d had. They already knew from Belinda that centias could be brave. But when Josie told them about a time when she’d gone up a tree to escape from a hairy-biter, been swooped at by a flying swooper, fallen off right on to a Hoo-Min’s head, and then run down his whole huge body (“Almost as big as the tree!”) with him whacking at her with his big front feet, and got away, they thought she was almost as brave as they were.

  After many days and nights, the ship docked and the crates in the hold started to be unloaded.

  The centeens realised that a change was happening. There was light again, coming from above. Soon their straight-up-hard-thing was swinging upward and then downward.

  It wasn’t long before they were moving again, the jiggling noisy movement they’d felt before. There was no doubt now that they were a long, long way from home, because the smells were all different. And the air was, too.

  “It’s cooler here,” Harry said, questing about with his feelers. “Drier, too,” George said uneasily. “Oh, I want my basket!” moaned Josie.

  “I thought no-meat-feeders didn’t fuss,” said Harry.

  “Only about food,” Josie said. “We can fuss about anything else.”

  “Speaking of food, we’ve eaten everything,” said Harry.

  “I know,” said George. “We’ll have to get out of here and hunt soon.”

  But it seemed to them a long time before the jiggling stopped and the crate was finally lowered to the ground.

  There was a lot of noise going on all around them, and many new and alarming smells and vibrations. Most of it, they knew at once, came from Hoo-Mins. Peering out and feelering around, they could see and sense and smell them. The most gigantic, fast-moving, terrifying things in the world – and they were everywhere! Running around on their two legs, making loud noises to each other, and moving lots of big things from place to place.

  “Hoo-Mins are so weird!” said George. “What are they all doing? They don’t seem to be hunting, or eating, or tunnelling – and what else is there? I can’t make it out at all.”

  “Oh, I know!” said Josie. “It’s do-diddle. They do-diddle all the time, I’ve watched them.”

  “What’s do-diddle?”

  “It means rushing about doing things that don’t make sense – that we’d never bother about. I don’t know if it’s to do with their food or their nests or what. It’s just – do-diddle.”

  They looked at her, puzzled and curious.

  “Do you watch Hoo-Mins a lot, then?”

  Josie looked rather uncomfortable. “Well, er – yes. I do watch them. From time to time. But I don’t understand any of it really.”

  “Tell us more,” said Harry.

  “Well,” Josie said. “This straight-up-hard-thing, for instance. I watched them do-diddle that. It wasn’t like this to begin with. It was just flat pieces of a tree. After they’d do-diddled it, it was like it is now, a different shape, big enough to hold all these yellow-curves and move them about.”

  George and Harry looked at each other. She wasn’t just a pretty poison-claw. She was clever.

  “So what are they do-diddling now?” asked George.

  They watched crackle-lessly for a while. Then Josie shrugged (a centipedish shrug of course, by hunching her front two segments).

  “They’re just moving things about,” she said. “They do that a lot. They’ve probably got some kind of plan, but I don’t know what.”

  None of them did, but you can, because I’ll tell you.

  Their crate had been brought to a big covered market. All the bustling and do-diddling was the Hoo-Mins preparing to sell the produce inside them.

  Pretty soon, there were screeching noises and lots of vibrations and then light flooded down to the centeens through the chinks in the yellow-curves. Then, very quickly, the yellow-curves began to be taken away.

  Instinctively the three centeens (please take this to mean two, and one centeena) fled down, through and around the bunches of bananas to the very bottom of the crate. More and more bunches were lifted off, and soon there was only one more layer above to hide them from the Hoo-Mins.

  “Let’s get out of here!” said George.

  They found a long hole near to the ground, and with George in the lead they squirmed through it.

  A terrible uproar broke out among the Hoo-Mins.

  “Blimey! Look at them horrible things!”

  “Kill ‘em!”

  A big shadow fell on them. Harry knew what that meant! Something was trying to squash them!

  “Run! Run your fastest!” he signalled wildly.

  5. A Feeler-close Escape

  Belinda had once told Harry a breathing-hole-stopping story about how she’d been chased by a Hoo-Min who was trying to stamp on her. She’d only just escaped.

  Now Harry, George and Josie found out what it’s like to be chased by a whole crowd of Hoo-Mins, all trying to stamp on them.

  It was absolutely terrifying. Big boots kept crashing down. Things were thrown at them. The only good thing was that there were three of them, all running madly in every direction, and this confused the Hoo-Mins who were trying to get them.

  Two of them, bent on squashing Josie, banged straight into each other, bounced off, and fell over backwards, nearly squashing George who was behind one of them. Another, his eyes fixed on the ground where Harry was ducking and weaving, lifted his heavy boot and tripped another Hoo-Min who was aiming for the same squirming, zigzagging target.

  In about ten seconds of our time – it seemed like for ever to the centeens – the Hoo-Mins were in such a tangle they completely lost sight of the centeens. Each one had raced off in three different directions and dived under three different objects. They lay there, alone, trembling as only a centipede can tremble – well, actually they tremble much like us, a sort of quiver.

  The foreman of the work-gang came over to the tangle of market-men.

  “What’s going on here?” he shouted.

  The Hoo-Mins untangled themselves and scrambled to their feet.

  “Sorry, guv. We was after some tropical centipedes that popped out of that crate. Huge great things they was, wasn’t they, Kev?”

  “I never seen anything like ‘em. They must’ve been half as long as my arm!”

  “Poisonous, them sort. Mate of mine got bitten by one once. Hand was paralysed for a week.”

  The foreman scanned the floor for signs of squashed centipede.

  “Well? So where are they?”

  “Dunno, guv. They’ve gone.”

  “You mean, you let them escape?” roared the foreman.

  “We couldn’t help it! You should’ve seen ‘em run! If they was horses, any one of ‘em could’ve won the Derby!”

  “Do you mean to tell me,” yelled the foreman between clenched teeth, “that there are poisonous centipedes loose in this market just waiting to bite someone?”

  There was a silence.

  “Well you’d better bloomin’ well FIND ‘EM!” he shouted, and went stamping off.

  There followed a half-hearted attempt to locate the fugitives, but it was soon given up, because the foreman started bellowing at them to “GET BACK TO WORK!”

  After that things quieted down a bit and the centeens emerged from their hiding places and started creeping around, keeping close to straight-up-hard-things, looking for each other.

  Harry found Josie first. She came rushing up to him, in a state.

  “Oh, Hx!” she crackled. “I’m so glad you’re all right! I was so scared! I thought for sure we’d be stopped!”

  Harry was only grateful she didn’t mention anything about how the centeens had promised her they’d look after her and not let anything bad happen.

&n
bsp; “Let’s find Grndd,” he said.

  They soon did. But they got a shock.

  “Grndd, you’re hurt!” Josie crackled.

  George had been hit a glancing blow by a bunch of bananas that had been hurled at him. Two of his back segments weren’t working. He was dragging them along. The other two could see he was hurting badly and he couldn’t move very fast at all.

  He kept saying things like “It’s not so bad, I’m all right,” but they could see he wasn’t. They hustled him under some big thing and got into the middle of it where it was dark and there was a nice damp place on the ground. The ground, of course, was not proper ground. It was something hard and cold and unyielding. You couldn’t possibly dig in it. Harry had already noticed this. Not to be able to dig was a very serious matter.

  “We’re in a Place of Hoo-Mins,” he said solemnly. “And we’ve got to get out of it to where we can find a tunnel. Or make one.”

  They lay under the big thing all day. They managed to get a bit of sleep, at least Harry and Josie did. George hurt too much. Centipedes aren’t like dogs or cats, which can lick their hurts to help them heal. They just have to stay as still as possible and hope their bodies will get better by themselves. Luckily all bodies try their best to get better, and by the time night came, George was feeling – well, not as bad as before. He could move his injured segments a bit. But he didn’t feel like doing any running, that was for sure.

  At night the market went quiet for a few hours – all the Hoo-Mins went home and the lights were turned out and the big doors were locked. The centeens crept out at last and Harry and Josie quested round about while George stayed still.

  “We should go that way,” reported Harry, pointing with his feelers. “I can smell earth, and there’s a long hole we can get through.” He meant the crack under one of the doors.

  “Can you manage, Grndd?” asked Josie anxiously. “We can help you.”

  Which is what they did. Harry and Josie went either side of George and they kind of nudged him along. But it was very slow.

  “Perhaps you should leave me,” George crackled after a while.