Harry the Poisonous Centipede: A Story To Make You Squirm. Tony Ross

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       5. Harry Upside Down

      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.

      Harry tested his twenty-one segments by lifting them one by one off the ground, and all his forty-two feet by moving them in the air, in a sort of ripple, first along one side of him, then along the other. They seemed to work. What a relief!

      He tried to run. He found he could! He did. He ran as fast as he could run in the direction of home. (He knew by instinct which direction to run in.)

      As he ran, he tried to think. Should he tell his mother what had happened to him?

      Probably better not. Even though he hadn’t done the one thing she’d told him never to do – go Up the Up-Pipe into the Place of the Hoo-Mins.

       6. The Lie

      “Hxzltl! Where HAVE you been? I’ve been really worried about you!”

      “Oh… I’ve just been – er – you know—”

      “Hunting?”

      “Er – yes.”

      “Any luck?”

      Now she mentioned it, Harry realised that he hadn’t eaten since those twenty-five ants’ eggs he’d had for breakfast and that he was absolutely starving. He shook his head.

      Belinda gave a centipedic smile (which she did by waving her front feelers in a particular way). “I’m glad because look what I’ve brought you! Your favourite!”

      And she stepped aside and showed him a large, crunchy, juicy treat – his favourite indeed! It was a locust, which is like a very big grasshopper.

      “Mama! Wow! Thanks! Can I eat it now?”

      “Of course you can, best-in-my-nest!” she said proudly.

      He ate the locust greedily, head first, although the head was the best bit and he usually saved it till last. By the time he’d crunched the last leg, he realised he wasn’t feeling very happy.

      You can guess why, of course. He felt bad because he’d lied to his mother. But he didn’t see how he could have told her he’d been so stupid and nearly got drowned.

      Still. It wasn’t as if she’d absolutely forbidden him to play near the water. She’d only forbidden him to go Up the Up-Pipe, to the Place of the Hoo-Mins. And he hadn’t done that.

      He wasn’t going to do it, either. Not him. No, never. He didn’t want to mess with those awful Hoo-Mins.

      And he probably wouldn’t have done, if it hadn’t been for Grnddjl.

      Don’t even try it. Let’s call him George.

       7. About George

      George was Harry’s best friend. They’d been best friends almost from the time they’d come out of their mothers’ baskets.

      George didn’t live with his mother. He’d run off and left her, as most centis do, as soon as he could run, and he called Harry a sissyfeelers for wanting to stick with his mother.

      George lived and hunted alone, and because he was still very young and couldn’t always catch anything, he often felt hungry.

      Then he saw the sense of having a mother.

      He would come creeping along to Belinda’s nest-tunnel and lie there, waving his front feelers feebly, looking really pathetic, until she would say, “Oh, all right then, George, you’d better come and have a bite of lizard with us. But stop teasing Harry for still living with his mama!”

      Belinda worried a lot about Harry being such good friends with George. Harry got himself into enough scrapes without George leading him into all sorts of adventures.

      “You don’t have to do everything Grnddjl does, you know,” she would often tell Harry. “He’s a very foolish and naughty centi.”

      “Don’t worry, Mama. I can think for myself,” Harry would say.

      But it’s very difficult, when your friend wants to do something that sounds exciting, to be a “dry sandbed” (which is like a wet blanket with us) and say you don’t want to join in because your mama wouldn’t like it.