Read Harry the Poisonous Centipede Online
Authors: Lynne Reid Banks
Harry the Poisonous Centipede (13 page)
It was a lovely quiet night â the moon shone down through the trees and made dappled patterns on the leafy ground â just the kind centipedes feel safe in. Harry and George ran around and played in the moonlight.
“Wasn't it awful, though? â the Hoo-Min!”
“We actually climbed on it!”
“Don't tell your mama, she'd kill us!”
“She was right about them. They are the scariest things in the world. But I must tell her! She'll be so proud of us!”
“Don't count on it! I'd keep quiet, if I were you,” said George, rubbing his bottom with his back legs rememberingly.
After a while they got hungry again, and that reminded them what they'd come out for.
They spotted a young toad squatting near a patch of wet ground where the Hoo-Min had been watering its garden.
They raced each other up to the toad. It tried to hop away, but they caught it,
overpowered it with their poison-claws, and were soon dragging it back to their tunnel.
By the time Harry and George got home, Belinda was better. She'd got up and was waiting for them.
“My wonderful centis!” she said, and gave them a centi-kiss with her feelers. “Thank you for helping me home! And now, I want to hear everything.”
Harry's wish to tell his mother everything
had gone. He didn't know quite how she'd take it. So he said, “Er â well, we spotted this toad, andâ”
“No, No! When you went Up the Up-Pipe!”
“Oh, that.”
“Of course I know you were both lucky and didn't meet a Hoo-Min, or you wouldn't have come back alive.”
“You
did, Mama,” said Harry.
“I
did?” asked Belinda, puzzled.
“When you went up. When you were young.”
Belinda crouched down and they saw her feelers quiver. “That was very different. Your father was with me.”
Harry stiffened with astonishment.
“My
father?”
He hadn't known he had a father. He'd never heard about him.
“I meant to tell you when you were older,” said Belinda. “I didn't want to make you sad.”
She looked so sad herself that Harry was afraid to hear, but he had to. “Tell me now, Mama!”
“Your father was a brave centipede. When we went Up the Up-Pipe together, we were young and foolish, and we didn't know what was up there. The Hoo-Min chased us, and your fatherâ” She stopped.
“Yes? Go on!” crackled Harry.
“Your father turned on the Hoo-Min and attacked him, and let me escape down the Up-Pipe. I⦠I never saw him again.” She dropped her head and trailed her front feelers on the ground, a sign of deep sorrow.
Both centis were speechless.
“He gave his life for me, so I could look after you and the other little centis in my basket,” Belinda said quietly. “It's time you knew, Hxzltl.”
“So that's why you told me never to go Up the Up-Pipe,” Harry breathed. “That's why it's the worst place in the world for you.”
“I never dreamt,” said Belinda, “that one night I'd send you up there myself, and that it would save all our lives.”
They were all very quiet. The toad lay among them and nobody thought of eating it. George was thinking, “Maybe the Hoo-Min we climbed on is the very one that killed Hx's daddy.” The idea made his cuticle cold on his back.
That was when Harry said, in a choky crackle, “My daddy was a hero.”
Only he didn't say “hero”. There was no word, then, for hero in Centipedish. He made one up, and afterwards it spread â the way new words can â until all centipedes now use it to mean “the bravest of the brave”.
What Harry said was, “My daddy was a centipede-who-tackled-a-Hoo-Min.”
And in case you're wondering if, in that case, Harry and George became centi
heroes because they'd actually climbed on a sleeping Hoo-Min and gone in its mouth â they didn't.
They didn't because they never told Belinda, and they never told any other centipedes about their adventure. They kept quiet because they knew they hadn't been brave â only reckless and foolish.
But every once in a while, when they were alone together, they would nudge each other, and one of them would sayâ¦
“I wish we'd just had one good bite each, though â don't you?”
10 WEIRD AND WONDERFUL FACTS ABOUT POISONOUS CENTIPEDES
ARE YOU SCARED OF CREEPY-CRAWLIES? QUIZ
- There are lots of different kinds of centipede, but Harry is a giant black centipede. He will grow to be about 20 centimetres long, like his mother.
- Centipedes, even giant black ones, are not dangerous to humans, unless they are allergic to insect bites. But a bite from a centipede HURTS.
- The name Centi-pede means a hundred legs, but most kinds of centipede have far fewer. Centipedes seem to ripple along the ground when they run, so it's hard to count their legs!
- Centipedes have special front legs called maxillipeds. They squeeze poison over these sharp claws and stick them in their enemies.
- Centipedes have their skeletons OUTSIDE their bodies to keep their soft inner parts safe. This skeleton is called a cuticle and Harry's is shiny and black. It is divided into twenty-one segments. Each bit has two legs, one on each side.
- Each leg is slightly longer than the one in front, so a centipede's back legs are longer than the front ones.
- If one of its legs is cut off, it will grow back again.
- Centipedes breathe through tiny holes along their bodies.
- Centipedes have bad eyesight, but their sense of smell is fantastic.
- They “smell” and sense things with two long feelers which stick out of their heads.
Centipedes have their own way of talking about the Hoo-Min world. What did Harry, George and Belinda mean by:
