Harry the Poisonous Centipede (3 page)

It felt very damp here – extra damp. There was a gleam down below – a pool! Harry got excited.

“Ooh, Mama! Look at that water! Is it like the sea? Can I play Sea-Centipedes?”

Harry had heard many stories about his
cousins, who long ago had moved from earth-tunnels to homes by the ocean.

But Belinda shook her head. “No, Hxzltl! This is no place to play! It's very, very dangerous. Now, come over here, and look up.”

Harry could now see that there was a faint light in the cave. It was coming from a tunnel above their heads that seemed to go straight up.

“What a funny tunnel!” he said. “It's so straight! And its walls are as shiny as your cuticle, Mama!”

“Yes. No centipede burrowed this one! You can see it's not made of earth like our regular tunnels. It's made of some hard shiny stuff. It's not easy to get a grip on with your feet. But just the same it's possible to climb it. I know because—” She stopped suddenly. “Only you mustn't, Hxzltl. Do you hear me?
You must not go
Up the Up-Pipe.”

“Why not?”

“Because it leads into the Place of Hoo-Mins,” she said in that same hushed voice she had used before, the one that made Harry's cuticle go cold.

“How do you know, Mama?”

“I would rather not say.”

“Have
you
been Up the Up-Pipe? Was it the second time you just escaped from a Hoo-Min?”

Belinda turned her head away. A long shudder ran along her back.

“Yes. When I was young and knew nothing of danger. I had no mama to guide me. But you have, pride-of-my basket. So listen: Never, ever, ever, go Up the Up-Pipe. Because if you do, you may never come down again.”

Harry wasn't stupid. His mother had really frightened him about the Hoo-Mins. He didn't even want to explore the Up-Pipe.

But the pool underneath it was something else.

Every young centipede learns about its cousins the marine centipedes, and young ones always play at being able to swim in the sea, and hide in the rocky crevices between the high and low tidelines, and live in empty barnacle shells or sea-worm tubes.

Harry couldn't swim. But he loved water. There wasn't much rain in the country where he lived, but just occasionally there would be a storm, and rainwater would flow into the tunnels and make puddles. They weren't very deep and the water soon steeped away, but while they lasted, Harry would paddle in them and pretend to be a marine centipede.

He was pretty sure he would be able to swim if he ever found a puddle deep enough to try.

And now he knew about the pool under the Up-Pipe, he kept thinking about it. He could pretend it was the sea and that he was a fearless marine centipede. Why shouldn't he learn to swim, if they could? It would be such fun to take his mother to the pool one day, and pretend to fall in to give her a fright, and then show her how he could swim.

So one day, or rather one night, he scurried off down the forbidden tunnel that led to the pool and the Up-Pipe.

He ran down the earthy slope to the edge of the water.

It was dark and scummy – not nice clean water like the rain made. It didn't smell nice, either. (This was because the Up-Pipe was a drain, which carried away a Hoo-Min's dirty shower-water. But Harry didn't know that.)

He was determined not to be put off. He turned round and tried the water with his back feelers.

That was all right. So he walked backwards until his rear five segments were in the pool. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine.
Now he was nearly halfway in, and his tail-parts began to float to the top.

He couldn't hold them down. Was he swimming? He wriggled his rear nine pairs of legs and his body moved about. That was swimming, surely? He backed a little further. And a little further…

Whoops!

With only a third of his body-length still on shore, he began to lose his grip on the earth with his front legs.

He clawed frantically with his first seven pairs of legs, digging the tiny claws
on their tips into the soft, wet earth. But there was too much of him already floating in the scummy water. Something seemed to be pulling at him, dragging him away from the safe ground.

But Belinda was far away and couldn't catch his signals.

Harry clutched and tugged, and sent out signals of distress, but nobody came, and the water kept pulling until first one, then another, and finally all seven front segments left the shore. Harry found himself struggling in the deep, dark badsmelling water!

Kicking and squirming, he was carried along through the darkness. He kept going under, and the water entered his breathing holes (he had one in each segment). He would blow it out and pop to the surface again but he knew he couldn't go on doing this for long. He was choking – choking all along his length. It was terrible! He was going to drown!

He sank beneath the surface once again. “I'm dead!” was his last conscious thought. “Oh, Mama!”

He woke slowly. He felt awful. Truly awful.

The world was all wrong, somehow.

Harry's eyes weren't good anyway and now they were useless. They seemed to be staring straight into the earth. Something hard was pressing on the back of his head. His legs weren't touching anything. He kicked them about, trying to run, but it was no use. He thrust out his poison-claws, which was always his reaction to danger. They closed on emptiness.

He slowly realised how he was. He was upside down, a position he'd never been in before. That was why he felt so funny.

He didn't realise how lucky he'd been. He'd been washed to the side of the pool, or stream, or whatever it was, on to his back. Because of this, all the water that had got into his breathing holes had drained out. Of course he still couldn't breathe very well because some of the holes were now blocked by the ground.

He struggled to right himself, rocking
this way and that, wriggling and twisting.

With a final jerk, he managed to get his front half round the right way. After that, it wasn't hard to turn the rest of himself.

He looked around. The pool wasn't there any more. Just a long muddy channel. It seemed that the water flowed down it, like the rainwater in Harry's regular tunnels, and then soaked away, somehow.