Harry the Poisonous Centipede Goes to Sea

by Lynne Reid Banks

  But George had already tried. The hole was too small.

  “Try to push under!”

  But that was no good either. The flowerpots weren’t plastic, they were those heavy ones made of red clay. It seemed hopeless.

  “Hx, can you see the tunnel entrance?” George asked.

  “Yes. It’s over there were the earth-ground is.”

  “Go down it to our nest. You can be safe.”

  “What, and leave you two? I can’t do that!”

  “Stupid us all getting—” George stopped because he didn’t want to crackle “stopped”. The thought was too awful.

  “I tell you what,” said Harry. “I’ll hide in the dark place. If he tries to take you away then maybe I can be a Hero, like my dad.”

  The centipedish way of saying ‘hero’ is ‘a centipede-that-tackles-a-Hoo-Min’. Harry’s father had been stopped after biting a Hoo-Min, so George knew at once what Harry had in mind. The thought made him shiver from one pair of pincers to the other.

  Harry was planning to attack the Hoo-Min who had can’t-get-outed them.

  “Don’t do it, Hx!” came a crackle from Josie’s flowerpot. “You’ll be stopped for sure!”

  “Not for sure,” said Harry bravely. “My mother tackled a Hoo-Min once and she didn’t get stopped.” He paused to think how incredibly proud his mother would be if he became a Hero. Except that of course she’d never get to hear about it.

  They didn’t crackle any more. There was no more to crackle. Harry curled up in the dark place under the shelf and waited and the other two waited under their flowerpot can’t-get-outs. They were all very scared. Quite soon, the Hoo-Min opened the door and came back into the greenhouse. And he brought another Hoo-Min with him.

  Now, most Hoo-Mins, confronted with enormous tropical centipedes in their greenhouse, would simply try to kill them. Hoo-Mins are horribly inclined to kill anything they don’t recognise – no matter how much bigger they are and how little they actually have to fear. Or how unusual or interesting their find may be.

  But not this Hoo-Min.

  This Hoo-Min happened to be very interested in small life forms. He was, in fact, what we call an entomologist – that is, someone who studies insects. So when he got over his shock at seeing the three centipedes in his greenhouse, he was actually very excited – not least because he simply couldn’t imagine how they had got there.

  And now he’d caught them! He wasn’t sure what he was going to do with them, so he’d hurried back to his house to get some advice from one whom I will call Mrs Hoo-Min.

  She was rather special, too. Many female Hoo-Mins are scared of creepy-crawlies, but not this one. She was almost as excited as her mate about this extraordinary find. She had thought of a way to transfer the captives from their flowerpots into a box – a box with a sheet of glass on top, so that they could be studied.

  “Let’s put the one on the seed tray into the box first, before it digs its way out,” she said, swiftly summing up the situation. She lifted flowerpot and seed tray together and quickly emptied them into the cardboard box.

  Nothing came out (except compost).

  “Oh, no!” she said. “It’s gone!”

  And now she was scared. Because it’s one thing to have a poisonous centipede trapped under a flowerpot, and another thing to have it running around loose, who knows where. So she started crackling – sorry, I mean saying – some rather unkind things to the Hoo-Min about being careless and silly.

  The Hoo-Min waited till she’d finished and then said, “Well, don’t panic, because I know where it is. It’s behind these pots.” Which is certainly where Harry had been – but he wasn’t there now.

  The Hoo-Mins moved every pot and seed tray and bag of compost and tool in the greenhouse, but they didn’t find Harry. At last the Hoo-Min – rather bravely, I must say – lay down on the ground again and started poking about with a long stick into the dark corners. Which is where Harry said he was going to hide. But he wasn’t there now. Can you guess where he was? The safest place?

  Yes! Right. While the Hoo-Mins had been searching down the far end of the greenhouse, he’d decided the best place was in the tunnel leading to their underground nest, so he’d rushed into that, and he was down there feeling the vibrations of those big feet on concrete and earth. Waiting for his chance to be a Hero.

  16. The middle of the dark-time

  In the end, the Hoo-Mins had to give up the search.

  Mrs Hoo-Min did a trick with the sheet of glass, slipping it under the other two flowerpots and tipping George and Josie into the cardboard box. Then she put the glass on top and the Hoo-Mins peered down at the two centipedes through this glass lid. Mrs H was absolutely amazed by how big they were.

  “How on earth did they get here?” she said. “Where could they have come from?”

  “Either they escaped from some collection, or they stowed away in some shipment from a tropical country,” said her mate. “You hear of creatures travelling in crates of fruit sometimes.”

  “Poor things! So far from home. They must be cold here.”

  “Oh, come on,” said the Hoo-Min. “You’ll be worrying about them missing their mothers, next. Let’s take them into the house and have a good look at them.”

  But this was too much for Mrs H.

  “Excuse me! They’re not coming into the house!” she said. “They can stay out here.”

  “Oh…But I’ve got all my books and equipment in my study—”

  “No.”

  “Well. Maybe you’re right. Just look at the size of them! Look at those forcipules!”

  “Those what?”

  “Forcipules,” the Hoo-Min repeated proudly. “That’s the scientific name for their poison-pincers. I wouldn’t like to get a nip from one of those!”

  “Exactly,” said Mrs H firmly.

  The two Hoo-Mins stayed in the greenhouse for a long time, looking at George and Josie through the sheet of glass. The Hoo-Min proudly told his mate quite a lot about this particular kind of centipede. He knew their Latin name right off by heart.

  “These amazing creatures, my dear, are not just common-or-garden centipedes. They are scolopendromorphs. Skolo – pendro – morfs. Or, if you prefer, you can call them scolopocryptops.”

  “Skolo – poc – rip – tops!” repeated Mrs H. “That makes them sound a bit like dinosaurs!”

  “Dinosaurs?”

  “Yes! Tricerotops, those sorts of names! Oh, isn’t this exciting!”

  “Do you realise that centipedes have been on this planet nearly as long as dinosaurs? Much longer than us humans. I really can’t wait to look them up on the Internet!”

  Meanwhile Harry was under the Hoo-Mins’ feet, and George and Josie were under their faces. Harry was safe enough, and in a nice dark damp place, but the others had nowhere to hide from the light and they couldn’t have been more unhappy.

  After what seemed like for ever, the Hoo-Mins took themselves off.

  Harry promptly popped up out of the tunnel and ran up the tree-thing. He was soon slipping and sliding on the glass covering of his friends’ can’t-get-out.

  “Why didn’t you bite them?” was George’s first signal. Which was a bit unfair of him, after nobly urging Harry to save himself.

  “Because they weren’t taking you away,” said Harry, rather hurt. “If they try to take you away, I’ll tackle them all right! Both of them!” How he was going to bite two Hoo-Mins at once, he didn’t stop to ask himself.

  “Please don’t leave us!” pleaded Josie. So Harry lay down on the glass lid to be as near his friends as possible, and they all just had to wait to see what would happen.

  What happened was that in the middle of the dark-time, the door of the greenhouse quietly opened and the Hoo-Min came back in. Harry was getting ready to run, but suddenly a stream of light hit him. It was like something pinning him to the spot – he got dazzled and couldn’t move.

  The beam of light was of course a torch that the Hoo-Min
had brought. When he shone it on the box, the first thing he saw was Centipede Number Three on top of the glass.

  “Sociable little fellows, aren’t you?” he said, as he dived for a flowerpot.

  Harry ran like mad, but the beam of light followed him, blinding his eye-clusters. He turned this way and that, not so much to escape the Hoo-Min as to escape the horrible blinding light. In no time, the flowerpot came down and he was trapped again. It was almost a relief to be in darkness.

  Before he knew it, he was in the box with the others.

  17. Centi-heroes

  The Hoo-Min picked up the box and left the greenhouse.

  He carefully switched off the torch while crossing the garden and went into the house. There he took the box to a room that was his study, and put it on a big table. He closed the door quietly. Then he switched the top light on.

  Light flooded into the box and the poor centeens ran round and round trying to avoid it, but they couldn’t, and in the end they just huddled together in a corner.

  Where, you might ask, was Mrs Hoo-Min at this point? The same Mrs H who had forbidden her mate to bring centipedes into her home? Well, she was fast asleep in bed. The Hoo-Min was doing this behind her back. That was the reason he was being quiet.

  Now the Hoo-Min began to study his captives seriously. He had some big books with lots of pictures of centipedes and other creatures open in front of him. He had a large magnifying glass and a notebook in which he began making notes and drawings. His computer was switched on and he had called up a website all about giant centipedes. He was having a wonderful time.

  The trouble was he didn’t know where to stop. He didn’t think anyone would believe how big his centipedes were – unless he measured one.

  Of course, he wasn’t stupid enough to try to do this without taking precautions. He had a pair of very thick gardening gloves made of leather that he was pretty sure no centipede could pierce with his – ahem! – forcipules.

  But there was a problem. The gloves were so very thick that they made him clumsy, so he decided to use only one of them – the one for the left hand. He would hold a centipede down (gently) with his gloved hand, and measure it. He needed his right hand free to do the measuring, which was rather a delicate operation.

  He lifted the glass carefully off the box.

  “I’ll measure the biggest,” he muttered to himself. “When I write my article for a scientific journal, I want to make it as impressive as possible.” And he reached his gloved hand into the box.

  The centeens did exactly what the Hoo-Min had expected. They cowered into the corner. “Small creatures run away,” thought the Hoo-Min. “They don’t attack unless they’re cornered.” He smiled to himself, because the centipedes were cornered. He was sure they would be too scared to do anything but keep as far away from him as possible.

  Now, he had to do this quickly. He made a lightning grab for George with the hand with the glove on it. He caught him by the back of the head and pulled him out of the box.

  George writhed and twisted and wriggled and writhed some more. He tried to escape. He tried to bite. He raised his back end and tried to nip with his back pincers. He got hold of the glove and tried to pierce it, but it was too thick for him.

  Meanwhile the Hoo-Min was struggling to lay a ruler alongside George and measure him. But George was wriggling so much that he couldn’t.

  So the Hoo-Min got clever. Holding George’s head-end with his gloved hand, he got hold of the tail-end with his ungloved hand, just above the pincers (remember, the back pincers are not poisonous), and stretched George’s body quickly and carefully alongside the ruler.

  He just had time to say “Eighteen centimetres!” in a tone of wonder, before he let out a howl of agony.

  He’d been wrong – so wrong – about centipedes not attacking.

  If he’d just read a little further on the website, he’d have discovered that giant centipedes can be very aggressive. It might not have added “especially when their friends are in danger”, but you and I know that it should have done.

  The Hoo-Min was dancing around the room, alternately shaking and gripping his right hand with its bitten finger. Twice bitten. Once by Harry, once by Josie. He was making the most extraordinary noises. They were extraordinary because, after the first howl, he was trying not to howl any more, although it was hurting like mad.

  He didn’t want Mrs H to hear him.

  Unfortunately, she already had.

  A few moments later she threw the door open and rushed in in her dressing gown, crying: “My dear, whatever’s happened, what’s the matter?”

  She didn’t even notice that as she rushed in, three very swift arthropods rushed out.

  18. A Very Lucky Non-escape

  Luck is one of the most important things in this life.

  And luck doesn’t just happen to Hoo-Mins. It happens to centipedes too.

  Now you might think that the luckiest thing that could happen to Harry, George and Josie at this point would be to find the front door of the house open and make their escape.

  But just think what would have happened if they had. They’d have found themselves back in the big city, with all the traffic and hard pavements and not much to eat and lots of Hoo-Mins just wanting to kill (sorry, stop) them. A life of fear, probably quite short.

  So it’s lucky, to start with, that the front door was not open, though with Josie in the lead they made a dash for it. She knew where it was because she could feel a draft coming under it. A very thin sort of draft. Because the space under the door was thin. Far too thin for them to squeeze through.

  They stopped and turned. They meant to run back the way they’d come and try to find another way out. But they couldn’t. Because, walking slowly and menacingly along the floor towards them, was their old enemy, the cat.

  I’m sorry to hurt the feelings of any cat-lovers among you, but cats are not the brightest of animals. You’d think this cat would take one look at his tormentors and run a mile. But it had sort of forgotten about Josie biting it. It saw these wiggly things and its instinct told it to investigate them. So instead of running away from them, it ran towards them.

  They fled behind an umbrella stand in a corner of the hall.

  This was a good move. The cat couldn’t get at them now. It made a few cautious dabs with its paw (and nearly got it bitten again) and then decided to sit down and wait for them to come out.

  There was a lot of noise coming from the study. Mrs H was really very upset about her mate going against her wishes. I’m afraid she wasn’t awfully sympathetic about him getting bitten, once she saw that he was only in agony and not about to die.

  He, meanwhile, saw no reason now to hold back his howls – in fact he saw a reason to howl louder. He wanted Mrs H to realise how painful the bites were and maybe be a bit kind to him after all.

  They were both very worried about the centipedes being loose.

  Before long, Mrs H had to ring for an ambulance. The phone was in the hall, and after making the call she turned around and saw the cat staring very hard into the corner where the umbrella stand stood. She understood at once where the missing centipedes must be.

  She summoned her mate.

  “They’re behind the umbrella stand,” she said.

  “Oh, oow, ohh,” he moaned. “When’s the ambulance coming?”

  “Soon. What are we going to do?”

  The Hoo-Min said something rude about not having the slightest idea.

  Mrs H lost her temper.

  “You are hopeless!” she said. “Go and get those gloves.”

  He tottered off and got the gloves. She put them on. Then she took a jacket off a peg in the hall.

  “Get ready to lift the umbrella stand away when I tell you,” she ordered her mate.

  “I can’t lift anything. My hand—!”

  “Oh, bother your hand! Pull it then. Now!”

  The Hoo-Min jerked the umbrella stand away from the corner, and like lightning Mrs
H threw the jacket on top of the centeens.

  The cat thought it was a game, and pounced on the jacket.

  Mrs H yelled at the cat and it fled.

  She fell to her knees, quickly pushed the edges of the jacket towards the middle, and with great skill flipped it over and gathered it into a sort of bundle, with all the centeens inside. She shook them down into the bottom, and held all the open edges tightly together. (Ah, you thought they might run out through the sleeves? Sorry, she held those too.)

  “Now bring me a box with a lid,” she said to her mate, who was standing there with his mouth open. He didn’t look a bit like a clever entomologist, but then probably the poison was surging through him, stopping his brain from working. “There’s one in the garage. Hurry!” The poor Hoo-Min staggered away.

  By the time the ambulance arrived to take the Hoo-Min to hospital, the centeens were once again can’t-get-outed.

  So where’s the good luck in that? you may ask.

  You’ll see.

  19. Some Even More Wonderful Good Luck

  Mrs H forgot to shut the cat up, but luckily cats aren’t as clever even as honey badgers (you’ll know what I’m talking about if you’ve read Harry’s other adventures) or maybe they’re just not as strong. Although it certainly tried, it couldn’t get the lid off the box. It scratched the outside with its claws, though, giving the centeens another awful scare. Really, it was all getting too much – they were feeling worn out. But Josie was the calmest.

  “What’s going to happen to us?” George waickled. “If the hairy-yowler doesn’t get us, the Hoo-Mins will!”

  “What do you think, Jgn?” asked Harry.

  “I think the hairy-yowler can’t get in here. And I think the Hoo-Mins don’t want to stop us, or they would have done it by now.”

  “Specially when we bit one. That’s when Hoo-Mins usually stop you, is when you bite them,” said Harry.

  “All it did was yowl louder than the hairy-yowler,” said Josie, and that gave them a bit of a centi-giggle.

  The cat gave up and went away. And soon afterwards the Hoo-Mins returned. The first thing they did was have a peep in the box.