“Help,” Harry signalled simply.
Bare-tail stood up.
“Hungry?” he signalled, snapping his teeth and sticking his tongue out.
Harry tied several half-knots in himself, which was centipedish for “Very hungry”, but Bare-tail didn’t get it. So Harry just grovelled a bit in a “Yes, please” sort of way.
“Follow me,” signalled Bare-tail, and, turning, scuttled off along the ledge beside the yuck-water.
9. George’s Even Bigger Mistake.
The whisk of Bare-tail’s bare tail led them on through the darkness for some distance until they came to a sort of crack in the wall. From this was coming what we might call a mouth-watering smell, so strong that it almost drowned out the yuck-stink.
Bare-tail poked his long nose into the crack, which was like a little cave. Another long whiskery nose came out to meet it. They gave each other a bare-tail kiss, and exchanged some signals the others couldn’t understand. They guessed Bare-tail was explaining to his mate who they were, or rather, what.
“I wonder what name he’s got for us,” Harry murckled.
Bare-tail turned back to them. “Eat,” he signalled. He did this by taking a bite off some horrible thing in front of them and then pushing it towards them. They backed away hastily.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” said Harry.
“What you eat?” signalled Bare-tail.
George said, “Smells as if there’s something really tasty in there,” indicating the little cave where Bare-tail’s mate was. He poked his head in. Mrs Bare-tail, if I can put it like that, moved aside to let George look, and Harry, feeling curious, wriggled under George and stuck his head in, too.
Lying in a rough sort of nest (please don’t ask me what it was made of) lay a number of delicious-looking little pink squirmy balls. They looked to a centipede like so many cream doughnuts would to you.
“Those look good!” said George appreciatively. “Could we have one each, do you think?” And he made a move to help himself to the nearest one.
The next moment he nearly lost his head.
Mrs Bare-tail simply flew at him and tried to bite it off. Luckily Harry, who was underneath, reared up; she missed, George fell off backwards, and then Harry turned, and fled like lightning – even so, feeling rodent teeth closing on three of his back legs, he had to cast them off. Isn’t it amazing, that they can do that? And the legs then did their thing! Centipedes’ castoff legs have a wonderful way of wiggling even after they’ve come off, which distracted Mrs Bare-tail just long enough.
“Run for it!” shouckled Harry. (A shouckle? Come now. A cross between a crackle and a shout, of course.)
It was a terrifying chase. The two bare-tails pursued the three centeens along the slimy ledge for a long way. Harry only had thirty-nine feet now that he’d cast off three, so he wasn’t running his best, and he couldn’t keep up with George and Josie. But then George, who was in the lead as usual, skidded, and suddenly disappeared.
The others couldn’t stop, the bare-tails were too close behind – they ran on frantically until the awful clicking sound of their pursuers’ claws on the hard ledge stopped. They’d given up the chase and gone back to their nest.
Centipedes can run fast even with a few legs missing, but not for long. They run out of oxygen. Of course the centeens didn’t know that, but they knew when they were exhausted. Harry and Josie sprawled on the ledge. After a short time, a bedraggled, wet and stinking George crawled up to them.
“What happened to you?” asked Harry.
“Fell in, didn’t I,” mutterckled George.
“Into the—?”
“Yes. Don’t ask…It nearly finished me off from sheer disgust. But I remembered I knew how to swim and managed to stay afloat and keep my breathing-holes out of the wet. I let the flow carry me along until I found a place where I could clamber out.”
“Welcome back,” said Josie.
“Now,” said George after shaking himself, “will somebody please explain why those nice friendly bare-tails suddenly turned on us like that? I thought they liked us.”
“Until you suggested eating their babies,” said Josie. “You fat-claw! How could you be so silly?”
“You mean those tasty little morsels were—Oh. Oh. Why didn’t somebody tell me?”
“You’ve just got no centi-sense,” Josie scokled.
“Well, at least I was polite about them,” said George. “I said how good they looked. The bare-tails ought to have been pleased.”
“I don’t think so!” said Josie. “If anybody tried to eat my babies—”
“Have you got any?” asked Harry, very startled.
“Of course not. But if I did.”
They stopped crackling for a bit. In fact, they all dropped off to sleep for a long time, they were so tired. When they woke up, George said, “Now what?”
“Well, we’ve got to get out of this breathing-hole-blocking place,” said Harry. “There was a way in. There must be a way out.”
“Maybe there’s an Up-Pipe,” said George slowly.
“What’s that?” asked Josie.
“It’s a dangerous tunnel that leads up to a Place of Hoo-Mins,” explained Harry. “But it can’t be much worse than this. Let’s find one.”
10. Up Another Up-Pipe
They walked the ledge slowly, looking around them, and especially upward.
Once they thought they saw quite a large tunnel up near the roof. They were just going to climb up to it when a great gush of water, looking like a rather mucky Niagara Falls to them, came pouring out and they had to run quickly forward to avoid being caught in it and washed into the yuck-river. Perhaps you can guess what that was.
They were beginning to think they’d never find a suitable Up-Pipe when they saw something very interesting.
“Stop! Keep still!” whisperckled Harry, who saw them first. The other two lay flat and Harry pointed with his feelers at the wall. A double line of flat, brown, shiny creatures was crawling up and down.
“Oh! I know those,” said Josie.
“So do I,” crackled Harry very quietly. “Remember, Grndd? The Not-So-Big Hoo-Min fed them to us when we were in the hard-air can’t-get-out.”
“I never really fancied them then,” he answered. “But I could eat a nest full of them now, I’m so hungry.”
“They like living with Hoo-Mins and eating their food,” said Josie.
Once again the others were impressed with how much she knew.
“So that means there must be a Place of Hoo-Mins up there,” said Harry.
They turned their heads upward. They couldn’t see much. But the brown beetle-things must be going somewhere.
“Right. We’ll go up there.” George stood up. “But before we do, let’s grab a snack,” he said, and he and Harry shot towards one of the brown shiny things, which were actually cockroaches.
The next few seconds gave a cruel blow to the two centeens’ pride. They really considered themselves about the fastest things around – it never occurred to them that they wouldn’t be able to catch these beetle-things that were just ambling along. But one minute the wall and the ledge were swarming with fat crunchy-looking meals-on-legs, and the next they had vanished.
The centeens stood, baffled and empty-poison-clawed.
“Hey! Where did they go?” asked George.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get a chance to tell you,” said Josie, who hadn’t moved. “They’re very fast. When they sense danger they’re just gone. I don’t think any centipede could manage to catch one. I call them faster-than-us’s.”
“Faster-than-us’s?” said George, outraged. “How can you invent a rude name like that? Faster-than-us’s? It’s an insult to all centipedes!”
“Well, sorry and all that,” said Josie. “But if you think you’re so much quicker, why aren’t you munching one right this minute?”
“Let’s not hang around here,” said Harry hastily. “Let’s try to get up there and see if there??
?s a way out.”
Getting up the wall was easier for a cockroach than for a centipede because centipedes are heavier. In the end, though, they did it, and there they found, sure enough, a pipe sloping upward with some cool air coming through it – air that smelt quite clean and fresh for a change.
“I hope we don’t find ourselves in that awful no-top-place again,” said George. He meant the city street that had been so full of noise and danger for them.
“Oh no,” said Josie. “We won’t. If we were coming out there, we’d feel the vibrations already.”
They crawled up the Up-Pipe. It was very smooth and hard to get a grip on, but the slope was not very steep. Little did they know how lucky they were that another gush of water didn’t come rushing down to meet them and wash them back into the yuck-river, because what they were doing was crawling up the drainpipe of a Hoo-Min’s kitchen sink. Luckily it was night-time, and the Hoo-Mins who owned the sink and the kitchen were asleep.
The three centeens emerged one by one. There was some cold-hard in the way, just at the outlet of the pipe, but they managed to squeeze past it. George, who was the biggest, got stuck, but the other two took hold of him from above and pulled him out with something like a pop.
“We can’t go back that way,” said George. “Not after we’ve had something to eat.”
“We’ll find another way out,” said Harry comfortingly.
“We must do that right now, before we look for food,” said Josie in her capable way. “We must know how to escape in case a Hoo-Min comes.”
They crawled out of the sink and down to the floor of the kitchen. It was a whole lot nicer than the muck-tunnel – there were no bad smells – but it wasn’t particularly clean. If you live where there are creepy-crawly things, and I include mice and ants as well as cockroaches, you mustn’t leave bits of food lying about or you get all kinds of visitors. Of course, Hoo-Mins living in this city, far from the tropics, had no reason to expect to be visited by three large poisonous centipedes.
“We have to find a straight-up-hard-thing that moves,” said Josie. “It’s the way Hoo-Mins get in and out.”
The other two looked at each other.
“How come you know so much about Hoo-Mins?” asked Harry.
“Well, if you must know,” said Josie rather defiantly, “I once lived with them.”
The other two stopped dead. “YOU WHAT!” they crackled both at once.
“Yes,” she said. “I came out of my egg in a tunnel right underneath a Hoo-Min nest and that’s how I grew up as a no-meat-feeder. I used to go up what you call their Up-Pipes and eat their food. I hated the meat they had. They do something to it. They make it hot somehow, and after that it’s horrid, but they had plenty of other nice things. I never really learnt to hunt and stop things because it was so easy to just eat tree-droppings and other things the Hoo-Mins ate.”
George and Harry were flabbergasted. A centipede who lived with Hoo-Mins! It was unthinkable. Totally uncentipede.
“Didn’t they ever hunt you?”
“No. I was careful. I only foraged in the dark-time. They never saw me. Not once.”
George, struck crackle-less for a long moment, at last said, “Well. If you know so much about Hoo-Min nests, how can we get out of this one?”
“I’ll show you.”
She ran across the kitchen floor to where there was a door. It was slightly open. “We go through here first,” she said. “After that, we just keep feeling where the fresh air is coming from, and head for that.”
“What if there’s a straight-up-hard-thing in the way?”
“Listen, Hoo-Mins have to get in and out of their nests, just like us,” she said. “There’s never a place without a way out. And in an emergency, you can always hide. Their nests are full of good hiding places. Find something close to the ground and dive under that, like we did before. Now let’s eat. There’s lots of good food, I can smell it.”
Centipedes normally like to catch live prey. They don’t like eating dead things. But there wasn’t much choice here. They found, and stopped, a few unwary ants (which they crunched up like peanuts), and there was a cockroach that had already stopped. When George tried eating it, he wasn’t so sorry that they were faster-than-us because it was fairly disgusting. Besides, the taste reminded him of bad times.
But Josie was very happy. She found an apple core, quite fresh, under the sink, which had been thrown at the waste-bucket and missed, and lots of crumbs and some smears of jam that she got quite excited about.
“It’s like tree-droppings, only much nicer!” she said. “Do try it!” But the centeens wouldn’t. They’d found a sort of dried-out puddle with some meat-scraps in it.
“I wouldn’t mess with that,” said Josie uneasily, as the other two crawled over the rim and started devouring the meat.
“Why not?” asked Harry, raising his head. George went on eating.
“I – I just don’t think you should,” said Josie. “There’s something about that thing you’re in. I don’t like the smell of it.”
“Smells of good meat!” said George with his mouth full.
“It smells of something alive, not stopped meat,” murckled Josie. But the others were eating too greedily to listen to her. So she just stood well back, looking unhappy.
Then they found another puddle with some tasty white stuff like water in it and they hung over the rim and had a good drink. Josie reluctantly joined in. She was too thirsty not to. But the minute she’d drunk her fill, she scuttled away from the two puddles and moved towards the door.
“I think we should go now,” she said.
But as she approached the door, it began to move.
It was being pushed wider. Around the edge of it came a big, round, hairy head. The head took one look and sniffed.
Josie reared up in horror. “Look out!” she crackled.
The next moment, total chaos broke out.
11. The Hairy-yowler
Imagine a face. Straight ahead of you, but higher. It’s looking down at you. It’s round and furry, with pointed ears, a triangular nose, and whiskers. But the main thing about it is that it’s enormous. Its face is as wide as you are with your arms stretched out, and then as wide as that again.
Now imagine that this monster is glaring at you with green eyes as big as your head, and that it then opens its mouth, which is full of teeth, makes a furious hissing noise, and takes a lunge at you.
Now you know what Josie saw when the monster came round the kitchen door and saw her.
It’s hard to describe the turmoil that followed.
Josie shot out of its way. The others, after a horrified moment when they were paralysed with fright, shot in different directions. The creature went mad. It chased George up a wall as far as it could before falling back. Then it chased Harry, who had retreated under the sink. There was a curtain hanging there, and the animal got tangled up in it. In its struggles, it knocked over the waste-bucket, which fell with a crash, scattering rubbish, some of it on Josie who was trying to get to the door.
It lost sight of Harry for the moment and saw George sliding back down the wall. It leapt towards him. Then it saw a movement and turned. Josie was crawling out from under the garbage. The predator made a wild rush at her. She, too, shot up the wall, but fell back – straight into its mouth.
You’d think that was just what it wanted, but it happened so unexpectedly that it got a fright. It jerked its head, spitting her out, and swiped her with its paw, lifting her off the ground. She clung to the paw and got in one good bite to its hairless pad before dropping off.
The cat – well, you’ve obviously guessed by now – let out a sort of cat-shriek and threw itself backwards, and then started frantically looking for a way of escape. It seemed to have lost its sense of direction completely and kept bouncing off walls. At last, almost by accident, it found the door, and fled, yowling.
The centeens flung themselves together and collapsed in a heap of feelers and legs (a
nd heads and bodies).
“What WAS that?” gasped George.
“It was a hairy-yowler,” said Josie, who, despite her close encounter, was calmer than the others. “They make a terrible noise. They chase you, but they don’t like it when they catch you. I know because the Hoo-Min nest where I lived had one. I should have remembered those puddle-things where the hairy-yowlers keep their food and drink.”
“You’ve been chased before by a hairy-yowler?”
“Oh yes. You see, Hoo-Mins sleep in the dark-time, but hairy-yowlers don’t. That’s when they go hunting. So I had to be extra careful when I went foraging in the Hoo-Min nest. At first. But after one bite – mine to it, I mean, it never bit me – it left me alone, in fact it was terrified of me.”
“So when you saw this one, I suppose you weren’t very scared?” asked Harry.
“Of course I was! This one didn’t know me.”
“It seemed to go completely crazy when it saw us.”
“Oh, they do. If you’re in their space, they do.”
There was a pause while they caught their breath. (As we would say. Actually they were renewing their oxygen.) Then George stood up.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
They crept cautiously around the half-open door and across a big open space. “Ugh! What’s this? Are we walking on a stopped hairy-biter?” asked George, picking up his feet.
In the tropics people don’t often cover their floors with carpets, so this was one thing about Hoo-Mins that Josie didn’t know. It made running quite difficult and slowed them down, but after a while they made it to the door on the other side of the room.
It was closed. And the carpet filled up the crack under it.
“We’re can’t-get-outed! We’re Dried-Out!” said George. (This centipedish expression, may I remind you, is slang for ‘done for’.)
“No, we’re not!”