Harry the Poisonous Centipede Goes to Sea Read Free Page A

across her cuticle, and their feelers stuck up straight, which meant, “Why are you crackling that to her? I’m crackling that to her!”
    Oh, dear. Centeenas. They can cause trouble even when they don’t mean to. It’s not their fault, of course.
    And just in case you were wondering what did happen to the head, since Josie hadn’t eaten it…Well, I’m sorry to tell you that another tarantula had sneaked up through the bananas, and grabbed it. Not very nice, tarantulas.
    In fact, the word ‘cannibal’ comes to mind.

4. Centeens at Sea
    Quite a long time passed. The three centeens crouched together amid the yellow-curves and tried to keep their centi-spirits up by sending each other hopeful signals. Then the straight-up-hard-thing began to move again.
    This time it moved sharply upward and then sideways. What was happening was that they were being swung through the air on the end of a crane, to be loaded aboard a ship. But they didn’t know that. When they poked their heads out of thelong hole and looked down, they couldn’t make out anything underneath them. They were too high up.
    All they knew was that there was a big bump, which made everything in the crate jump, and then there was no more bright light. That was a relief to them. There were a lot of vibrations and loud noises and after a while it got really dark (that was when the hatches went on up on deck.) The centeens looked and feelered about them.
    “Well, here we are – wherever we are,” said George, quite cheerfully. “At least we’re not going to drown.”
    “But what is going to happen?” asked Josie fearfully.
    “Who knows?” said George. “It’s a real adventure, anyway!”
    Harry didn’t say anything. He was thinking it was too much of an adventurefor his taste, and that Belinda would be worried sick. She was old and it wasn’t right to leave her like this. He looked at Josie, who was huddled up small at his side. “Do you want an adventure?” he asked her.
    “I want my basket,” she crackled faintly. Not many centeens even remember that their mothers once kept them in special little containers like baskets when they first came out of their eggs, but “I want my basket” is still what they say when they’re feeling miserable and homesick and scared.
    Harry was just going to crackle something comforting when George came over and boldly twisted his feelers around Josie’s.
    “Don’t you worry, Jgn. I’m right beside you. I won’t let anything bad happen.”
    She rubbed her head against his gratefully. “Thank you, Grndd,” she said.Harry lifted one feeler quizzically, and George saw it and looked away. He knew it meant, “Promises, promises.” George couldn’t really stop anything bad happening and George knew Harry knew that, but Josie didn’t know, and Harry wasn’t mean enough to tell her.
    At last a different movement began. It was a sort of slow rocking and swaying, and it went on and on. Sometimes it was a very strong, frightening movement that threw them about and had them slipping and sliding among the bananas. Sometimes it was quite gentle. They got used to it, and began to think of their nest in the yellow-curves as a sort of home from home.
    The worst thing by far was the cold. They weren’t used to being cold and they had no defence against it. Luckily for them, this wasn’t a refrigeration ship – you can’t freeze bananas – but the hold was kept chilled to keep the fruit fresh on its journey, and this was very hard on the centeens. They had to keep moving about as much as possible. As for keeping damp, this was a major problem too.
    What they did in the end was venture out of the crate and explore the hold of the ship until they came to a crate that held potatoes.Potatoes are generally stored and shipped with earth around them. Earth is damp, and this was how the centeens managed not to Dry Out. But there weren’t many living creatures in the dirt, so they had to keep returning to their original