Harry the Poisonous Centipede: A Story To Make You Squirm

Harry was a poisonous centipede.

You may think that’s not a very nice thing to be. But Harry thought it was fine. He’d never been anything else, and he liked being what he was.

If you’d told him centipedes are nasty scary creepy-crawlies, he would have been very surprised and rather hurt.

And if you’d told him that biting things with poisonous pincers was wrong or cruel, he would probably have told you not to be ridiculous. How else would he get anything to eat, or defend himself from creatures wanting to eat him?

Of course, you couldn’t have talked to Harry like that, even if you’d met him, because he couldn’t have understood you. Harry could only speak to other centipedes in Centipedish. In fact, his real name wasn’t Harry at all. It was (as nearly as I can write it) Hxzltl.

Hxzltl?

Yes. You see the problem at once. There are no vowel-sounds in Centipedish, just a sort of very faint crackling. What you could do is put in some vowel-sounds – some a’s, e’s, i’s, o’s and u’s – so that you can try to say his real name. Then you could call him Hixzalittle. Or Hoxzalottle. Or perhaps even Haxzaluttle. But still you wouldn’t be anywhere near the real sound of his name.

Which is why I call him Harry.

He lived in a very hot country – what we call the Tropics – with his mother.

Now, please don’t start asking what her name was. Oh no. Please. Oh… All right. Here goes. It was Bkvlbbchk. Bikvilababchuk? Bokvaliboobchak? Bakvolobibchawk? I don’t know. Why bother? We’ll never get it right. Let’s call her Belinda.

Belinda was also, of course, a poisonous centipede. A very large one – a good eight inches long, or twenty centimetres, if you want to be metric about it. Just imagine, eight inches of shiny, black, swift-moving centipede – a twenty-centi-centipede! Her body was something like a caterpillar’s, in segments, but covered with hard, shiny, dark stuff – a sort of suit of armour, which is called a cuticle.

Now, if you know a bit of Latin you’ll know that “centipede” means “one hundred feet”. Some kinds of centipede do have that many, but Harry’s kind didn’t. Harry and his mother had twenty-one segments with one pair of legs to each segment. Which makes forty-two legs. Each.

Quite a lot to keep track of, when you think about it, but neither Belinda nor Harry ever did think about it. Any more than you would think how difficult – Harry would have said, impossible – it is to move about on two legs. They just did it.

And did it, when they had to, very, very fast indeed.

Harry actually didn’t know just how fast he could run, until the Dreadful Time when, despite his mother’s sternest warning, he went Up the Up-Pipe. Which is the story I’m going to tell you.

When I get round to it. There are some other stories to tell first.

Harry, as I told you, lived in a hot country. But he didn’t know that for a long time because he didn’t live on the surface of the earth where the sun shone a lot. He lived in a mass of dark, cool tunnels under the ground.

He slept all through the day. But at night he would wake up and run along these lovely earthy tunnels, looking for things to eat. What things? Well, if you must know:

All kinds of insects and creepy-crawlies that were smaller than him.

He would chase after them, bite them, and, when the poison from his poisonclaws had paralysed them, crunch them up. Well, crunch if they were crunchy, like beetles, or munch if they were munchy, like worms.

Belinda, being much more than twice his size, could tackle big things like toads, small snakes, young mice and lizards. But then, she could go up to the surface to hunt. Only for a short time, though. Centipedes mustn’t get too dry or they can’t breathe, and it’s much easier to keep damp underground.

If she heard something thumping about on the surface that sounded good to eat, she’d nip along an up-going tunnel, scurry to the thumping thing, whatever it was, and if it wasn’t