Harry the Poisonous Centipede's Big Adventure

by Lynne Reid Banks

  But at last there was a horrible jolt and shock, and the flying stopped.

  They lay perfectly still for a long time, each wondering if he’d been bumped to pieces. But the jar wasn’t still. It swayed and slid about a bit. Cautiously they uncurled and began running about. They could see the prison was on its side. And they didn’t like the movements of it.

  “We’re not on the ground, Grndd,” said Harry fearfully.

  “Where are we?”

  “I – I think we’re high up in a tree,” said Harry.

  They were. It was a palm tree, and – perhaps luckily – they’d landed right in the middle of its clump of long, shiny leaves. When it swayed, they swayed, and slid about in the slippery jar.

  How were they going to escape?

  It would have to be soon. Big-yellow-ball was shining down on them in a very fierce, hot way. They hated that. It blinded their weak little used-to-the-dark eyes. AND…

  “Hx! I’m drying out!”

  Drying out is one of the worst things that can happen to a centipede. That’s why they live underground where it’s always damp.

  Suddenly their prison jolted again, and a welcome shadow fell on them. I say “welcome” because it hid them from big-yellow-ball. But Belinda had always told Harry, “If a shadow falls on you, run!” And he couldn’t. He could only crouch down in dread.

  Something heavy and hard banged against the hard-air. It made a big vibration, so much that both centis almost leapt in the air. The bang came again – and again! It hurt their ear-holes! It was horrible!

  The fourth bang made a different sound. They didn’t know why, but something told them that whatever was banging on their prison was trying to get them, and that that different sound meant the hard-air might be about to break.

  Harry managed to look upward. Then he wished he hadn’t.

  Above him through the hard-air – which had a strange line across it now, a wiggly, jagged line – he could just make out what was causing the shadow.

  “Grndd! Look!”

  George looked up. “Wh – what is that?”

  “It’s – it’s – it’s the biggest flying swooper in the world!”

  It was indeed the most enormous flying-swooper he had ever dreamt of in his worst nightmares. It was glaring at him ferociously and hungrily, cocking its head from side to side.

  What it was, though Harry didn’t know this, was an eagle. Soaring overhead, it had seen something unusual in the tree-top, and it had swooped down to see what it was. There was nothing weak about the eagle’s eyes. It spotted the centis the moment that its huge feet landed on top of the palm tree. And it at once determined to eat them.

  So it banged the glass with its great hooked beak. Banged it and banged it. The fourth time it banged, its beak cracked the glass. But pickle-jars are tough. It didn’t break.

  Now this kind of eagle does something rather clever with hard things that contain food. Like bones, for instance. It carries them high into the sky in its talons, and then, when it spots a handy rock underneath, it drops them and breaks them so it can swoop down and scrape out the good stuff inside.

  The eagle reckoned the jar was a new kind of bone, a splendid kind that let you see the good stuff even before you broke it. So. It picked up the clear-bone (that’s an eagle’s way of thinking about a jarful of centipedes) and with powerful beatings of its wings, leapt off the top of the palm tree into the air.

  It was flying away with the centis, fully meaning to drop them from a great height onto the first handy rock it saw.

  8. The No-End Puddle

  Ah! There was a perfect rock. Nice and flat, so the clear-bone wouldn’t roll away. And with water all around it so that the wriggly things he wanted to eat, couldn’t escape.

  The eagle was just taking aim and preparing to let the clear-bone go when he sensed danger and twisted his head.

  Another eagle was heading straight for him!

  He turned his great wings at right-angles in midair to stop himself. Then he turned and faced his rival. Instinctively he spread his talons out in front of him to defend himself.

  The clear-bone – the hard-air prison – the jar – loosed from the eagle’s grip, dropped down and down, through the sunlit air.

  The rock, like an irregular-shaped table, lay below. Waiting. The two centis curled up together, every segment clenched, hating the falling feeling. Though they didn’t know it, the rock came nearer every split second! How could they avoid being killed by the terrible impact?

  But it didn’t happen.

  When the eagle had been attacked, it had spoilt his aim. The jar missed the rock and fell into the sea.

  And as it hit the water, the crack made by the eagle’s beak came apart. The two halves of the jar flew into the air. The lid landed upside down on the surface of the water, with the centis inside its rim. Luckily, pickle-jars often have deep lids. It was like a round boat.

  A boat with a hole in it. The hole the Hoo-Mins had made, so the captives could breathe.

  Harry recovered first. He just knew that the water mustn’t fill the lid. He saw it begin to come through. Instinctively he stuffed his back segments into the hole.

  His tail-end was in the cold sea, but the water stayed out. Their lid-boat, with them clinging to it, bounced about on the surface of the water.

  George uncurled. He looked around. There was nothing to see but sea, and as he’d never seen the sea he didn’t know what it was. Heaving green water under blue no-top-air.

  “Hx! Where are we?”

  In a hollow, fearful crackle, Harry answered: “It’s the no-end-puddle, Grndd.”

  “No-end-puddle? You mean, like in your mama’s stories about marine centipedes?”

  “Yes. She told me about it. That’s how I know.”

  “Maybe some marine centipedes will help us!”

  “Not unless we can get to the edge of it.”

  “But how can the no-end-puddle have an edge if it’s no-end?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I thought they were just stories,” crackled George. “I didn’t think the no-end-puddle was real.”

  A wave lifted them upward. They were on a water-hill. They tried to look all around before they went down again into a dip. Harry said excitedly, “Grndd, I can see something not water!” He pointed with his front feelers.

  “Are we going towards it?”

  “I don’t know – I hope so!”

  They were lucky – the sea was calm. In a short time their lid-boat was washed quite gently up on to a smooth sandy beach. Before the no-end-puddle could collect it again, Harry had wrenched his back-end out of the hole, and the two centis had crawled quickly out of the lid and run as fast as they could up the sandy slope, away from the endless water.

  “That puddle tastes terrible,” said George. “Yeuchh!” He rubbed his mouth-parts against the sand to take the salt taste away, but the sand tasted just as bad. It was wonderfully damp, though, and the two centis set to work at once to dig enough of a tunnel so they could hide and feel delicious damp darkness all around them for the first time since they were caught.

  9. To Eat – or Be Eaten

  They were so tired, they fell asleep curled up together in their shallow tunnel. They weren’t afraid any more, and they weren’t in prison, and they weren’t flying or bobbing up and down, or drying out. It felt like absolute centipede heaven to them, after all they’d been through.

  But when they woke up, they were hungry, and they remembered they were far from home and all alone in a very strange place. It wasn’t quite such heaven then.

  They emerged cautiously from their tunnel. And straightaway they got a fright.

  The no-end-puddle had crept up on them.

  They had run a long way from it before going to ground. But now it was lapping and hissing on the sand, almost right under their feelers, like some vast creature about to swallow them. In a short time, if they hadn’t woken up, it would have flooded into their tunnel and drowned
them.

  “Run, Hx! It’s trying to get us!”

  They ran away from it again. Higher and higher up the beach.

  The sand got drier. It began to be hard to run.

  “Stop, Grndd! The water doesn’t come here.”

  George gave a centipedish sneeze, blowing the fine dry sand out of his breathing holes.

  “Dare we go back a little way? This dry stuff’s bad, I can feel it drying me out!”

  They crept back nervously to the hard, wet stuff. The no-end-puddle hadn’t followed them. They began to run about, exploring. All around them on every side (except where the sea was) stretched sand.

  Sand was enough like earth for the centis to understand it. They thought of it as sharp-earth because its grains were sharp-edged and not soft like soil. But this was more sand than they’d ever dreamt of. It seemed as if all the sand in the world was here. After a while they came back to each other. “There’s nothing here but sharp-earth.”

  “Did you meet anything?”

  “No. It’s empty.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Me too.”

  “If marine centipedes live here, they must have things to eat.”

  “That’s right! Let’s hunt!”

  Now there was purpose in their running. They kept their heads low and their feet and feelers alert for vibrations.

  At first it seemed to them that the whole vast, flat expanse of sand was indeed empty. There were a lot of flies about. But they didn’t land very often and it was impossible to catch them.

  The centis noticed that there were little holes in the sand.

  “Maybe there’s something tasty down there?” George suggested. He put his head right over the opening, and then wished he hadn’t. A jet of filthy stuff came shooting out, right in his eye!

  “Ugh! What a disgusting thing to do!” he crackled, wiping his face with his front legs. He sent a signal of reproach down the tube and got another eyeful of dirt for his trouble.

  “That’s too much! Let’s dig it out and teach it manners, whatever it is!”

  Together they dug into the soft sand. Straight down – taking turns till their tunnel was three times as long as themselves. Finally Harry, busily digging, bumped his feelers into something soft. He rushed forward, grabbed it in his pincers and dragged it out backwards. When he got the tail-tip of it out, George had to help, because it clung on to its hole like mad.

  They got it out in the end. It was a worm, of sorts – a lugworm – and a fine feast they made of it, starting one at each end.”That’ll teach it to squirt its dirt in my eye!” said George with satisfaction.

  They found several other holes and ventured into one or two of them, but in one they found a thing harder than the hardest carapace. They hollowed out a little sand-cave around it and both tried to bite it, but it was no use. They had to give up.

  “It wasn’t a carapace, it was something else, as hard as the hard air,” panted Harry as they backed out into the no-top-world. “Some things certainly know how to make themselves safe around here.”

  They were still a bit hungry. They found a few hopping things which didn’t hop quite fast enough. They were like a packet of crisps to the centis – they nabbed them and crunched them up.

  “That’s better,” said George. “Now, what do you say we—” And then they felt something.

  Something big.

  They stopped and sent out signals in all directions. The vibrations got stronger.

  Suddenly, George stiffened. “Hx! What’s—”

  It was coming! They could see it now!

  But what was it? It wasn’t a hairy-biter. It wasn’t a flying-swooper. It certainly wasn’t a belly-crawler. And it wasn’t a Hoo-Min. It was a—

  Well. It looked to them a bit like a monster scorpion. But, no, it wasn’t, even though it had enormous great claws like one. Whatever it was, it was horribly sinister, with little evil eyes that poked out on stalks. It had a vast carapace, much, much bigger than the biggest beetle, that stretched not front to back but side to side. It was as wide as the centis were long – wider.

  It had giant mouth-parts. As big as their whole heads. Gaping. And it ran on long jointed legs like a spider. It ran sideways. And it was bearing down on them.

  Imagine a giant crab galloping towards you as fast as a horse. You’d be paralysed with terror.

  And so were the centis. They couldn’t move. Not a leg, not a segment. Not a feeler. It was too late to move.

  The thing was almost upon them.

  10. The Rescue

  At the very last moment – as the crab’s monstrous claws opened to grab them – it suddenly stopped, lowered its claws, and turned round on its spider-like legs. Its horrid eyes bugged out more than ever.

  Something was happening behind it.

  Harry and George, numb with terror as they were, peered between the thing’s legs and saw a number of small creatures parading over the sand, almost under the eyes-on-stalks.

  If centipedes’ eyes could pop out on stalks, too, theirs would have.

  “Grndd – look! Centipedes!”

  And so they were. Smaller versions of Harry and George!

  The monster had become confused. While its back was turned, the centis recovered enough to scuttle as fast as they could out of its way.

  They made a big half-circle on the sand, and ended up face to face with the small centipedes that had saved them by distracting the monster.

  “Come with us!” they signalled. Harry and George needed no second telling. They ran alongside their smaller rescuers, up the beach. Where the hard sand turned into soft, dry sand, there were piles of seaweed and other debris. The party of small centipedes dived underneath the pile and George and Harry followed.

  It was very smelly under there, but at least they were hidden.

  “Where do your tunnels start?” asked Harry as they pushed their way through the tangle of seaweed. The little centipedes could run under it easily but George and Harry were too big.

  “Don’t have tunnels,” answered the leader. “Live here under wrack.” The centis had no idea what “wrack” was but they guessed it was this tangled smelly stuff. After pushing through it for quite a way, they came to a more open place. It was roofed with seaweed – wrack.

  Harry and George looked at their rescuers. They weren’t like them. Well – they were – they were centipedes. But they were different. Smaller. A different colour. Fewer legs. A different kind of centipede. They were, as you must have guessed, marine centipedes.

  The first thing to do was to say thank you, and this Harry and George did. But their crackles were not quite the same as the marine centipedes’, so they had to crackle it twice before they were understood. Even then, the small centipedes made it plain they weren’t used to thank-yous.

  They wanted to boast, though. They explained that they’d been tracking the newcomers. They’d tracked the monster, too. (They called it a side-runner, whereas George and Harry already thought of it as eyes-on-stalks – you see how different their languages were, but the centis knew what they meant, all right – a monster by any other name is still a monster!)

  “When we knew that the side-runner had seen you and was going to charge,” said one marine centipede called Drnblb (or, with vowels added, Dorunbelb. Or Darinbulb? Drainoblab? Shall we call him Danny?). “We decided to make a diversion.”

  “It was very brave of you,” said Harry. “You saved our lives.”

  A female marine centipede edged up to them. At first they thought she was a centia (that’s a female child centipede) because she was so small, but it turned out she was fully-grown and a mother several thousand times over. Her name was Vrptkk. Veruptikuk? Varoptikak? Well, let’s settle for Veronica.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked, using the signal all centipedes use, a sort of knot-twist in their middles.

  They both did a knot-twist to show they were. She signalled with her feelers that they should follow her, and led them to a large mess o
f something in a puddle of sea water. They looked like lumps of jelly to the centis, not at all what they were used to.

  “What is it?” asked George.

  “What is it?” asked Veronica. “These are sea cucumber eggs. Delicious.” She snuzzled her mouth into the puddle and sucked some up with a noise that made Harry think of Belinda’s many reminders about table manners. (Of course, she called them mouth-part manners.)

  The two centis tried to eat the eggs but they were terribly salty and made them feel a bit sick.

  They asked if perhaps there was something else to eat.

  “Oh, well, if you’re fussy about your food!” said Veronica in a snooty voice. “Perhaps you’d prefer these.” And she showed them some lugworms.

  They were dead. In fact, they were rotten. They really looked awful, and they smelt worse.

  “Haven’t you any moving food?” George asked.

  Veronica stared at him.

  “Moving food? What do you mean?”

  “I mean – something you stopped recently. Or something we can stop.”

  “You mean – you want to kill something?”

  The centis were shocked. Centipedes hardly ever talk about killing. Biting, yes. Paralysing – yes. But killing is what can happen to centipedes, it isn’t what they do.

  “We don’t kill anything except in self-defence,” said Veronica. “If you want to go hunting, like a – well, like a side-runner or a screaming-swooper, you just go ahead, but don’t expect us to help you.”

  George and Harry looked at each other in bewilderment.

  “But in any case,” Veronica went on, “there’s not a lot to hunt on the hard-sand, not much lives there except side-runners and, down deep, shellfish.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What’s shellfish? Where do you come from? They’re fish in shells. Like the side-runner, but with no claws or legs. Only they’re no good till they’re dead because they’re shut in their shells and you can’t get at them.”