Harry the Poisonous Centipede Goes to Sea

by Lynne Reid Banks

  “Are you crazy?” said Harry. “We’ll make it. Just keep your good legs moving.”

  6. Snacks in a Cold-hard.

  At last they crawled through the long hole and felt themselves in the no-top-world, which meant in the open. They sensed there was some earth nearby and that instantly made them feel much, much more centipede.

  Harry went off exploring for a short time, and then came back. “I’ve found a lot of lovely soft earth,” said Harry. “Let’s dig a bright-time nest.”

  He didn’t dare mention eating. He knew the others must be as hungry as he was. He couldn’t smell anything familiar in the way of food. Perhaps they didn’t have any proper food in this strange place.

  They were soon crawling up on to a loose pile of soil. To Harry’s relief, the minute he and Josie started to dig, a number of tiny ants came rushing out. They were all much smaller than the ones the centeens were used to, but – “So what! Grab them!” said George. Harry had his work cut out. The ants were quick and it was hard to catch hold of them, they were so tiny.

  He barely managed to stop enough to give him and George a snack. George, who was obviously feeling better, complained bitterly that a centipede would need a whole nest of these ants to fill him up.

  Josie sat there primly and wouldn’t touch a thing.

  Harry felt really uncomfortable, snapping up ants while Josie just sat there with her head turned away.

  “Do you eat ants’ eggs? They’re not exactly meat,” said Harry.

  “Oh, yes, of course, I eat all kinds of eggs,” she said.

  So they dug some more and found part of the ants’ nest. It had been disturbed and most of the eggs had been carried away, but there were enough to take at least the edge off Josie’s appetite. Actually, she did better than the others, because the eggs were bigger than the ants and you didn’t have to chase them.

  “Any eggs left?” George asked.

  Josie took him the last one.

  “Now what do we do?” he asked when he’d finished it.

  “I’m going exploring,” said Harry. “You and Jgn stay here.”

  “I’m coming with you!” said Josie.

  So they started exploring together, leaving George to rest.

  It soon turned out that the pile they were on was fresh-dug earth, and that it was enclosed by some kind of holder, sort of like the thing they’d travelled in, only not really.

  “This isn’t part of a tree,” said Josie knowledgably. “It’s what I call cold-hard. The Hoo-Mins do-diddle a lot with this stuff. I tried biting it once. Nearly broke my poison-claw. You can’t burrow through it either. And sometimes,” she went on, “it do-diddles all by itself.”

  “You mean, it’s alive?”

  “Oh, no,” said Josie. “It’s not alive.”

  “So how can it move and – do-diddle?” He really liked this word (and so do I.)

  “Don’t ask me,” she said. “I only know it sometimes can. When Hoo-Mins are near it. It makes big vibrations and then some brown-choke comes out of it. It smells horrible. If it comes towards you, you have to run away like mad.”

  “This one’s completely stopped. Something very big must have bitten it.”

  Josie laughed her centipedish laugh, shaking up and down. “You are funny,” she said. “I told you, it’s not alive and it never was.”

  They ran and explored all over the cold-hard thing, which certainly was very big indeed. In fact it was a mechanical digger with a big heap of fresh earth in its shovel, but they didn’t know that.

  “Will it start to do-diddle in the bright-time?” Harry asked intelligently when they’d explored all over it.

  “Yes, I expect so,” she said.

  “Will it move along?”

  “That’s what they do.”

  “Might it take us home?”

  Josie ran round to face him. She rubbed her head against his.

  “Hx,” she said kindly. “It can’t take us home. We’re too far away, and there was all that no-end puddle in between. I don’t think we’ll ever get home,” she finished quite cheerfully.

  These were terrible, terrible words for Harry. He drooped and trailed his feelers in sadness.

  “Do you mind all that much?” Josie asked.

  “Yes. Because my mother’s there. She’s old and she needs me to look after her.”

  “I don’t know about that. I don’t think I ever had a mother that I can remember,” said Josie.

  “I know it’s not very centipede to stay at home with your mother,” admitted Harry. “I warm-heart mine, that’s why I stay.”

  “Warm-heart? Whatever’s that?”

  “You don’t know about warm-heart?” asked Harry in great surprise.

  “Never heard of it,” Josie said happily.

  Harry was completely flummoxed. He had no idea how to explain love to someone who hadn’t ever felt it. But he tried.

  “It’s a – a feeling. It makes you want to be with another, and, and – look after them.”

  “Doesn’t sound very centipede to me,” she said.

  “Well I’m as centipede as the next centipede and I warm-heart my mother, and I warm-heart Grndd too in a different way, and – I think it’s bad manners to say something’s not centipede just because you’ve never felt it!” he said, quite hotly for him.

  “Sorry! But you two feelered me as if I wasn’t fully centipede, when you found out I was a no-meat-feeder,” she said, which was so true that Harry couldn’t say any more. He just rubbed her head, which was his way of saying, “I’m sorry too, let’s make up.”

  They got back to George just as dawn was breaking, or, as a centipede would say, “Big-Yellow-Ball was coming back.” George had managed to dig himself under the soil a bit and they only found him by smell.

  “What did you find out?” he said, pushing his head out.

  “We’re on a cold-hard thing that moves,” reported Harry importantly. “I think what we should do is go to sleep and then wake up quickly if it starts do-diddling. Maybe it’ll take us somewhere where we can dig a proper tunnel and make ourselves more at home.”

  “Well, I hope it takes us somewhere where it isn’t so cold,” said George, who hadn’t been running around all night. If he’d been a Hoo-Min, his teeth would have been chattering.

  They didn’t get much sleep. The cold-hard thing – the digger – started juddering and spluttering and coughing out brown-choke quite early in the morning. Before the centeens could wake up properly, something very upsetting happened – upsetting in both sense of the word. The earth they were in suddenly turned itself upside-down and they found themselves falling through space.

  Even when they stopped falling, the earth around them didn’t. It rained down on them like the Great Dropping Damp, only instead of getting wet, they got buried.

  Down came more and more earth until they could feel the weight of it on their cuticles – so heavy that they all thought that if much more fell on them, they’d be squashed without any Hoo-Mins having to stamp on them. It was lucky their cuticles were strong.

  When the rumbling and thumping of the falling soil finally stopped, they tried to lift themselves on to their forty-two legs, but they couldn’t.

  Centipedes are used to living under the ground, but in tunnels, not with loads of loose soil heaped on top of them.

  They couldn’t even crackle to each other. Their mouth-parts were too blocked by loose grains of earth.

  But they all knew what they had to do. They had to dig. And they did. Little by little, using their poison-claws to hollow out a space in front of them, and their legs to push away the earth, they managed to burrow their way upward. And after a long struggle, first Harry’s head popped out, then Josie’s. They got rid of the earth in their mouths and looked at each other.

  “Where’s Grndd?” they both crackled at once.

  7. Josie’s Big Mistake

  “How can we find him?” asked Josie.

  “Easy,” said Harry. “Just liste
n.”

  So they listened, and then they could easily hear the tiny sounds of George’s struggle underground. They both began digging eagerly, and in no time they’d made a rough tunnel to where George was. Between them they helped him out, but they were relieved to see he was doing most of it himself.

  “All right,” he said, when they’d all cleaned their cuticles up a bit by stroking their legs over them. “Now what?”

  It was bad out there in the bright-time. They couldn’t make out anything with their dark-time eyes. But they could listen, and smell, and sense. They could hear the cold-hard thing noisily do-diddling away somewhere near them.

  “That do-diddler is moving the earth,” said Josie. “It’s dropping it where we are. If we stay here, we’ll be buried again. Let’s go. Can you run, Grndd?”

  George wriggled the three pairs of hurt legs. They worked pretty well. “It hurts,” he said, “but I can bear it.”

  “You’re so brave,” murckled Josie. (A murckle, of course, is a murmur when it’s crackled.)

  Harry agreed that George was being brave, but he wished Josie hadn’t said so.

  “Which way shall we go?” George asked. The others lifted themselves up so that they could quest better. Harry felt baffled. The air, the smells – everything was different, unfamiliar and alarming.

  But Josie refused to be scared. “That way,” she said, pointing with her feelers. “It’s away from Big-Yellow-Ball and I can sense…Well, I don’t know what, really, but I just think we should go that way.”

  The others took her advice, because they knew by now that Josie was very clever. But even clever centipedes, like clever Hoo-Mins, can make big mistakes.

  They set off together. First they had to climb a wall of earth (the mechanical digger was dumping earth into a trench) and then they just walked and ran and walked some more across what seemed like an endless, treeless desert. They came to something they thought of as hard ground. They felt it carefully with their feelers and front feet.

  “What is it?” Harry asked Josie.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  It seemed to make a terrifying lot of noise, anyway. They could see strange streaks of darkness rushing past, and each time one did, something like a strong wind nearly blew them away.

  “I don’t like this,” said George. And he was right.

  Where they actually were, was on the edge of a busy road. Every few seconds a car, or a truck, or a motorbike, went roaring past. Could their drivers have seen three – even quite large – centipedes scurrying across? Could they have stopped short, even if they did? Of course not.

  Have you ever been driving along a main road and seen a cat or dog on the verge, obviously dying to get across, and you’ve wanted to shout: “Don’t! Don’t! You’ll be run over!”

  If that’s how you feel about small creatures crossing busy roads, please close your eyes until I find a way to get the three friends safely to the other side.

  There. You can open them. I’ve done it.

  What do you mean, how? I just did. Writers can make all sorts of things happen. You don’t have to know all my secrets.

  You insist?

  Oh…all right then. What happened was, they had sense enough not to try to go ahead with all those black shadows racing past. So they walked along the road for a bit until they found a big tunnel (actually a pipe for carrying water), running under the road. And they went through that quite safely. The pipe was much, much bigger than their sort of tunnels, but it was dark and damp, and the centeens felt almost at home in it.

  About half-way through, they had a conference. It was lucky they could signal, because the noise from overhead was so loud, they couldn’t hear themselves crackle.

  “Why can’t we just settle down here?” suggested George, who was exhausted.

  “Because for one thing, there’s no earth to dig in,” signalled Harry.

  “And,” added Josie, “for another, this place gets full of water sometimes.”

  They looked at her. “How do you know?”

  Josie answered by running up the curve of the pipe as far as she could without falling off. “It’s wet up to here. That means, that’s where the water comes up to.” She ran down again. “And there’s no food here. Not your kind and not my kind.”

  Still, they decided to hole-up there until night-time. (Hole-up is a true centipedish expression, by the way, that has somehow crept into Hoo-Min-speak.) They were all very tired, but it wasn’t easy to sleep, as you can imagine, with all that traffic rushing and roaring over their heads. They’d never heard anything like it in their lives, and the vibrations were monstrous and fairly rattled their cuticles.

  When the round ends of the tunnel were dark, they pulled themselves together and went through to the other side. A lot of the noise and vibrations had stopped, but the night wasn’t quiet and pleasant like at home. At home, they’d always known when something was coming close, but here the noises arrived so quickly, and were so deafeningly loud and frightening, they got confused, or, as they would express it, upside-downed. There’s nothing a centipede hates much more than being turned on its back.

  “We must get away from this noise-hurt,” crackled Josie. “I can’t stand much more of it!”

  George’s injured legs were a lot better now and they were able to run fast away from the road. Soon they found themselves in a strange new place, even more difficult to understand than any of the new places so far.

  There was hard-ground everywhere. And straight-up-hard-things, jutting up and up. And more noise and vibrations than ever. They scampered here and there, trying to get away from it, and only finding more. Frankly they were very lucky not to meet with a sticky end, what with all the traffic and Hoo-Mins walking about. The centeens were so upside-downed they found themselves running in circles, and if they’d been Hoo-Mins they’d have been holding their ears.

  At last George signalled to the others: “Quick! Over here! I’ve found a tunnel!” And he disappeared through a hole in a slab of cold-hard, just big enough to admit him, and the others followed.

  8. The Bad-smell Tunnels

  They found themselves in a big, dark, cold, wet place. Big, dark, cold and wet didn’t bother them. But there was something that did, and that was the smell.

  Centipedes have a word for it: the-smell-that-closes-your-breathing-holes. But we have a word for it too – a short one. It stank in there. We can hold our noses if we have to. Centipedes can’t. The stench was so awful it was very hard for them to breathe.

  But at least the noise-hurt had been left behind.

  They soon realised that they were in another tunnel – a huge one, much bigger than the big one under the road. They ran down the rough sides of it and came to a flow of water. Well, I say water. It was water with a lot of other things in it. Not at all the sort of water you’d want to drink, or wash in – in fact, it was water that people had already drunk and washed in. If you know what I mean.

  In other words – it was a sewer.

  Centipedes, as you’ve realised, are very good at inventing new words, and before long they’d each invented their own word for this new place.

  “Smell-place.”

  “Stink-tunnel.”

  “Yuck-water.”

  This cheered them up a bit. Then Harry said something interesting.

  “It’s a Hoo-Min bad-smell. Remember, Grndd, how we smelt the water that came out of the Hoo-Min nest, and it was something like this only not so disgusting?”

  “However many Hoo-Mins would it take to make all this yuck-water?” wondered Josie.

  “As many as there are soldier ants on the march,” said George. And they all shuddered, because soldier ants are the worst things in the world to a centipede – even worse than Hoo-Mins. But the notion of that many Hoo-Mins all together was very scary indeed.

  There was a ledge alongside the yuck-water flow and they ran along it, not really knowing where they were going, until they suddenly stopped short. Bang in
front of them was a creature as long as themselves, but taller, with a pointed nose, rounded ears and brown fur. It stood there looking as startled as they felt.

  It was definitely a hairy-biter of some sort. Centipedes don’t really distinguish among, say, dogs and monkeys and badgers – they’re all hairy-biters, dangerous threats to their lives. This one wasn’t as big as those others, but they stopped just the same and got ready to run.

  The hairy-biter sent a signal that was unmistakable. It showed its teeth at them – two long yellow ones under its hairy top lip and whiskers: “What are you lot doing here? This is my patch!”

  All three centeens rose on to their back segments. Now they were taller. They waved their poison-claws, showing they could defend themselves. At this, the hairy-biter backed off and hastily signalled, “I’m not hunting,” so they sank down again.

  I think I mentioned that Harry was very good at other species’ signals. He’d learnt this skill while he was in a can’t-get-out once with a lot of other creatures. But all those creatures you could loosely call insects. (Did you know that only creatures with three body-sections and six legs are true insects? Centipedes are arthropods. Oh, you knew that? Of course you did. Sorry.)

  George pushed Harry forward.

  “We’re not hunting,” he signalled.

  The creature immediately lay down, to make himself look less threatening. The centeens thought this showed very nice manners. Harry felt something polite was called for.

  “We’re centipedes,” signalled Harry. “You?”

  “I’m a rat,” signalled the rat. But this was rather like two Hoo-Mins who speak different languages, saying to each other, “I’m Chinese.” “I’m Swedish.” Neither would be much the wiser.

  Josie, Harry and George immediately went into a huddle to pick a centipedish name for this new acquaintance.

  “Yellow-teeth?”

  “Bare-tail?”

  “Decent-type-hairy-biter?”

  They took a very quick vote and decided on Bare-tail, which was George’s, because it was the shortest. Harry went up to Bare-tail, who was still lying there quite patiently waiting, wiggling his whiskers and watching them with his beady little eyes.