Harry the Poisonous Centipede Goes To Sea

Harry the Poisonous Centipede Goes To Sea
Lynne Reid Banks

Harry the Poisonous Centipede is now quite brave, but nothing can prepare him for this next adventure! He and best friend George are lost in a new and even scarier no-top world. Far from home, across the no-end puddle, they must negotiate a strange treeless cold desert, a Nest of Hoo-Mins, lots of noise-hurt and terrifying hairy-yowlers!Harry woke up first. The straight-up-hard thing was jiggling. It was moving.“What’s happening?” asked George in alarm.“I don’t know. We’re moving.” Harry replied.“Where are we? We’re not where we were last night!” crackled George.“I told you! This is a can’t -get-out!”Harry and George face the toughest adventure yet when they are shipped West in a crate of bananas. Far across the no-end puddle, miles away from home, they must find a way to survive the bitter cold and hide from the hundreds of Hoo-Mins do-diddling around them. They run away as fast as they can, but inadvertently squirm into a Hoo-Min Nest and come face to face with a hairy-yowler!All Harry wants is to go home to his mother, and tell her how much he warm-hearts her before her time comes to “stop”. But before they can even start the perilous journey home, they must escape the Nest and go out into the no-top world. Yet this particular Hoo-Min is fascinated by insects, and wants nothing more than to add some poisonous centipedes to his collection…

Harry The Poisonous Centipede Goes To Sea

Lynne Reid Banks

For Paloma and David

Table of Contents

Cover Page (#u095caadf-4ca7-55c7-a0eb-9bdf63b66d2f)

Title Page (#u900922b0-ba4a-5d18-9734-5bc3474eb29f)

1. How it Began (#u5ad318b6-930d-5ea9-8b9d-08db1ad2beb3)

2. George’s Big Find (#u08af5bb4-245a-5343-b872-df4adb35974b)

3. The No-meat-feeder (#uc56ebc84-d306-5350-9c0a-3b68507d70e7)

4. Centeens at Sea (#ud5ccc718-ff22-58be-affb-b8e50953bae7)

5. A Feeler-close Escape (#litres_trial_promo)

6. Snacks in a Cold-hard. (#litres_trial_promo)

7. Josie’s Big Mistake (#litres_trial_promo)

8. The Bad-smell Tunnels (#litres_trial_promo)

9. George’s Even Bigger Mistake. (#litres_trial_promo)

10. Up Another Up-Pipe (#litres_trial_promo)

11. The Hairy-yowler (#litres_trial_promo)

12. A Hard Dark-time’s Work (#litres_trial_promo)

13. A Warm Hard-air Place (#litres_trial_promo)

14. Can’t-get-outed! (#litres_trial_promo)

15. Under Ground, Under Glass (#litres_trial_promo)

16. The middle of the dark-time (#litres_trial_promo)

17. Centi-heroes (#litres_trial_promo)

18. A Very Lucky Non-escape (#litres_trial_promo)

19. Some Even More Wonderful Good Luck (#litres_trial_promo)

20. Blocked! (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Lynne Reid Banks (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

1. How it Began (#ulink_29435288-02f4-5679-b894-57bdad2c50e9)

Harry and George were lying in the moonlight. They’d gone up to the no-top world as soon as it got dark – looking for an adventure, George had said, but there didn’t seem to be one. Harry had his suspicions that George wasn’t so much looking for adventure as for Something Else.

These aren’t people we’re talking about. They’re centipedes. And not those little wiggly wire-worms you dig up in your garden, either. These are giant tropical centipedes, and they are POISONOUS. They have pincers on their heads to defend themselves with, and also – I have to be perfectly frank – to kill things with, by biting them and paralysing them with their poison.

Terrible, you think? Cruel? Oh, please. This is the Natural World. Not many creatures in nature get by without eating some other creature, and that includes most Hoo-Mins.

What’s a Hoo-Min? Well, you’re going to have to do a bit of guessing in this story anyhow, so you can start with Hoo-Mins. If you reckon giant poisonous centipedes are scary, it may surprise you to know they’re much more scared of us. Us Hoo-Mins. Get it? Right. We’re the Hoo-Mins. That’s your first puzzle solved.

Hoo-Mins, or rather H-Mns, is Centipedish, the language of centipedes. They mainly use signals, but they can crackle very faintly to each other, and when they do there are no vowel sounds. So you must realise at once that their real names couldn’t be Harry and George. That’s just what I call them. Their real, Centipedish names were Hxzltl and Grnddjl.

Go on. Try to say them. Try to say your own name without the a’s, e’s, i’s, o’s and u’s (I’ll let you keep the y’s) and you’ll be talking Centipedish.

I must just add that of course centipedes don’t have words for a lot of things that they don’t know much about, so they’ve become very good at inventing ways to describe them. You’ll find a lot of these centi-descriptions in this story. I’m sure you’ll be able to work them out, but I’ll just give you a couple of examples. (Don’t worry – the story’s going to start at any minute!)

Hoo-Mins are the enemies of centipedes. But they have others. There are also hairy-biters (which is anything hairy that bites), flying-swoopers (birds, of course, plus maybe bats) and belly-crawlers. No prizes for guessing that one—it’s snakes, of course.

But Hoo-Mins are in a category all by themselves. The category of the fastest, biggest and scariest things around.

Harry and George lived underground in earth-tunnels, which are nice and damp (it’s very important to centipedes not to Dry Out) and came up at night to hunt. You’ll soon find out that their favourite foods were not things that you’d fancy.

When they were younger, they were centis, which is child-centipedes. But now they were centeens, about eighteen centimetres long – nearly as big as Belinda. Belinda was Harry’s mother and George’s adopted mother. Her Centipedish name – are you ready for this? – was Bkvlbbchk.

Belinda was getting quite old now, though she could still give a toad or a beetle a run for its money – it was just the very fast things like lizards and mice she had trouble with. So Harry and George did some of her hunting for her. They’d had lots of cuticle-rippling adventures and feeler-close escapes, but they always managed to get back home in the end. So she’d decided to stop poison-claw-clicking, which is how mother centipedes nag, and let them have their freedom.

“Just take care,” she would beg, as they headed out of their home tunnels up into the dark-time.

“We’ll be all right, Mama,” Harry would say as he chased after George, who still usually led the way. “We’ll bring you back something delicious for end-of-dark-time meal!”

So, on this night (night – dark-time – OK?), they’d done some hunting and had a tasty heap of goodies beside them. These included a couple of slugs, three assorted caterpillars, one large rhinoceros beetle, which had put up quite a fight but they’d overpowered it in the end, and a mouse. This was their big prize because they knew Belinda loved a tasty bit of mouse before she went to sleep for the bright-time. All right, I’ll help you out this time – the day.

“Mama will be really pleased with us,” Harry said contentedly as they lay there resting, feeling the pale, un-hot light of White Ball shining down on them. It wasn’t a full ball tonight, or they would have scuttled underground to escape it – they didn’t like too much light, being night-creatures.

“Apart from the beetle, though,” mused George, “we can’t say any of it was very exciting.” He didn’t seem to be enjoying the rest. Half his twenty-one segments were off the ground and he was waving his feelers around in all directions.