Harry the Poisonous Centipede Goes to Sea Read Online Free

do-diddle that. It wasn’t like this to begin with. It was just flat pieces of a tree. After they’d do-diddled it, it was like it is now, adifferent shape, big enough to hold all these yellow-curves and move them about.”
    George and Harry looked at each other. She wasn’t just a pretty poison-claw. She was clever.
    “So what are they do-diddling now?” asked George.
    They watched crackle-lessly for a while. Then Josie shrugged (a centipedish shrug of course, by hunching her front two segments).
    “They’re just moving things about,” she said. “They do that a lot. They’ve probably got some kind of plan, but I don’t know what.”
    None of them did, but you can, because I’ll tell you.
    Their crate had been brought to a big covered market. All the bustling and do-diddling was the Hoo-Mins preparing to sell the produce inside them.
    Pretty soon, there were screeching noises and lots of vibrations and then light flooded down to the centeens through the chinks in the yellow-curves. Then, very quickly, the yellow-curves began to be taken away.
    Instinctively the three centeens (please take this to mean two, and one centeena) fled down, through and around the bunches of bananas to the very bottom of the crate. More and more bunches were lifted off, and soon there was only one more layer above to hide them from the Hoo-Mins.
    “Let’s get out of here!” said George.
    They found a long hole near to the ground, and with George in the lead they squirmed through it.
    A terrible uproar broke out among the Hoo-Mins.
    “Blimey! Look at them horrible things!”
    “Kill ‘em!”
    A big shadow fell on them. Harry knew what that meant! Something was trying to squash them!
    “Run! Run your fastest!” he signalled wildly.

5. A Feeler-close Escape
    Belinda had once told Harry a breathing-hole-stopping story about how she’d been chased by a Hoo-Min who was trying to stamp on her. She’d only just escaped.
    Now Harry, George and Josie found out what it’s like to be chased by a whole crowd of Hoo-Mins, all trying to stamp on them.
    It was absolutely terrifying. Big boots kept crashing down. Things were thrown at them. The only good thing was that there were three of them, all runningmadly in every direction, and this confused the Hoo-Mins who were trying to get them.
    Two of them, bent on squashing Josie, banged straight into each other, bounced off, and fell over backwards, nearly squashing George who was behind one of them. Another, his eyes fixed on the ground where Harry was ducking and weaving, lifted his heavy boot and tripped another Hoo-Min who was aiming for the same squirming, zigzagging target.
    In about ten seconds of our time – it seemed like for ever to the centeens – the Hoo-Mins were in such a tangle they completely lost sight of the centeens. Each one had raced off in three different directions and dived under three different objects. They lay there, alone, trembling as only a centipede can tremble – well, actually they tremble much like us, a sort of quiver.
    The foreman of the work-gang came over to the tangle of market-men.
    “What’s going on here?” he shouted.
    The Hoo-Mins untangled themselves and scrambled to their feet.
    “Sorry, guv. We was after some tropical centipedes that popped out of that crate. Huge great things they was, wasn’t they, Kev?”
    “I never seen anything like ‘em. They must’ve been half as long as my arm!”
    “Poisonous, them sort. Mate of mine got bitten by one once. Hand was paralysed for a week.”
    The foreman scanned the floor for signs of squashed centipede.
    “Well? So where are they?”
    “Dunno, guv. They’ve gone.”
    “You mean, you let them escape?” roared the foreman.
    “We couldn’t help it! You should’ve seen ‘em run! If they was horses, any one of ‘em could’ve won the Derby!”
    “Do you mean to tell me,” yelled the foreman between clenched teeth, “that there are poisonous centipedes loose in this market just waiting