Читать книгу Harry the Poisonous Centipede - Lynne Reid Banks - Страница 10

4. The Pool

Harry wasn’t stupid. His mother had really frightened him about the Hoo-Mins. He didn’t even want to explore the Up-Pipe.

But the pool underneath it was something else.

Every young centipede learns about its cousins the marine centipedes, and young ones always play at being able to swim in the sea, and hide in the rocky crevices between the high and low tidelines, and live in empty barnacle shells or sea-worm tubes.

Harry couldn’t swim. But he loved water. There wasn’t much rain in the country where he lived, but just occasionally there would be a storm, and rainwater would flow into the tunnels and make puddles. They weren’t very deep and the water soon steeped away, but while they lasted, Harry would paddle in them and pretend to be a marine centipede.

He was pretty sure he would be able to swim if he ever found a puddle deep enough to try.

And now he knew about the pool under the Up-Pipe, he kept thinking about it. He could pretend it was the sea and that he was a fearless marine centipede. Why shouldn’t he learn to swim, if they could? It would be such fun to take his mother to the pool one day, and pretend to fall in to give her a fright, and then show her how he could swim.

So one day, or rather one night, he scurried off down the forbidden tunnel that led to the pool and the Up-Pipe.

He ran down the earthy slope to the edge of the water.

It was dark and scummy – not nice clean water like the rain made. It didn’t smell nice, either. (This was because the Up-Pipe was a drain, which carried away a Hoo-Min’s dirty shower-water. But Harry didn’t know that.)

He was determined not to be put off. He turned round and tried the water with his back feelers.

That was all right. So he walked backwards until his rear five segments were in the pool. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Now he was nearly halfway in, and his tail-parts began to float to the top.

He couldn’t hold them down. Was he swimming? He wriggled his rear nine pairs of legs and his body moved about. That was swimming, surely? He backed a little further. And a little further…

Whoops!

With only a third of his body-length still on shore, he began to lose his grip on the earth with his front legs.

He clawed frantically with his first seven pairs of legs, digging the tiny claws on their tips into the soft, wet earth. But there was too much of him already floating in the scummy water. Something seemed to be pulling at him, dragging him away from the safe ground.

But Belinda was far away and couldn’t catch his signals.

Harry clutched and tugged, and sent out signals of distress, but nobody came, and the water kept pulling until first one, then another, and finally all seven front segments left the shore. Harry found himself struggling in the deep, dark badsmelling water!

Kicking and squirming, he was carried along through the darkness. He kept going under, and the water entered his breathing holes (he had one in each segment). He would blow it out and pop to the surface again but he knew he couldn’t go on doing this for long. He was choking – choking all along his length. It was terrible! He was going to drown!

He sank beneath the surface once again. “I’m dead!” was his last conscious thought. “Oh, Mama!”