Harry the Poisonous Centipede: A Story To Make You Squirm. Tony Ross
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Название: Harry the Poisonous Centipede: A Story To Make You Squirm
Автор: Tony Ross
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Детская проза
isbn: 9780007402885
isbn:
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.
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.
“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 СКАЧАТЬ