Heller's Punishment Read Online Free

least to shake them off my
body.
    “Somebody help
me!” I shouted. “Please! There are spiders in here with me!”
    But nobody
could hear me. People in the crowd nervously edged away from me,
drawing their children to their side.
    “Somebody help!
Please!”
    A couple of the
museum staff, concerned expressions on their faces, rushed over to
me. They attempted to speak to me as I danced about with
increasingly frantic energy.
    “Are you all
right?” one asked, the master of the understatement, because I very
clearly wasn’t all right.
    “ Spiders! ” I screeched.
    “What?”
    “Spiders! Get
me out of here.”
    He turned to
his colleague. “What did she say? I can’t hear a word.” His helpful
colleague merely shrugged in ignorance. He took me by the arm and
led me to one side, away from the curious eyes of the crowd.
“What’d you say?”
    I didn’t want
to speak again, in case spiders crawled into my mouth. One was
making an exploratory foray up my right nostril and a couple of
others seemed to be building a web in my left ear. I waved the
dino’s tiny arms around in what I hoped was an instantly
recognisable mime for ‘get me the hell out of this costume because
it’s full of spiders’. But he didn’t seem to understand. And I had
to admit that mime had never been my strong point, being someone
with a self-acknowledged smart mouth who liked to talk a lot.
    “Would you like
us to help you out of the costume?” guessed the man into the mesh,
in an insultingly slow and patient way as if I had just landed in
the modern era from three hundred million years ago.
    I nodded the
dino’s big head, refusing to open my mouth.
    “Okay. Hold
still,” he said, his colleague reaching for the fasteners that
attached the head to the costume.
    Unfortunately
right at that moment, something scuttled across my eyeball and I
screamed, the spiders taking advantage of my open mouth to decide
that my tongue was just the spot to set up a new life. I
jitterbugged in horror away from the staff members, spitting
spiders out and trying to move my hand up to my eyes.
    “Hey, I said to
hold still!” the male museum attendant snapped at me.
    In my panicked
jiving I dropped the remote control inside the costume. Shit!
    I couldn’t lean
down to pick it up. Double shit!
    And then I trod
on it, activating both buttons and the dino locked into roaring,
swishing mode. Triple shit!
    I lurched
headlong into the milling crowd, not really registering them in my
urgent need to get the spiders out of my mouth. My tail whipped
back and forth, slapping people’s legs and butts, knocking over a
couple of little kids. I accidently slammed into people, roaring
right into their faces.
    “Someone help
me get out of this thing!” I yelled to no avail. Nobody could hear
me over the constant roaring. And let’s face it; a raging dinosaur
is the last creature you want to listen to patiently to find out
exactly what’s up its butt. So most people did the sensible thing
when faced with a dinosaur entertainer suddenly gone berserk in a
large crowd – they screamed and fled. It was pandemonium.
    Elton! I
thought in wild desperation. He’ll know what to do. He knows
everything about everything. He’ll help me. I have to get back
upstairs to him. And it was honestly the only thought in my
mind as I ploughed my way through the crowd, roaring and whacking
people left and right with my tail. All the while still convulsing
madly as the spiders found new crevices to investigate.
    I headed for
the lift. A couple of burly fathers, deciding that I’d terrorised
enough small children in my dino rampage, closed in on me, their
intent to bring me down in any way possible clear on their faces.
So I sidelined the lift and virtually sprinted towards the
escalator, roaring at everyone, people either scattering in my path
or risking a beating with my tail. A major headache pressed against
my forehead. Heller sure wasn’t going to be happy about this.
    I