It was a lovely quiet night – the moon shone down through the trees and made dappled patterns on the leafy ground – just the kind centipedes feel safe in. Harry and George ran around and played in the moonlight.
“Wasn’t it awful, though? – the Hoo-Min!”
“We actually climbed on it!”
“Don’t tell your mama, she’d kill us!”
“She was right about them. They are the scariest things in the world. But I must tell her! She’ll be so proud of us!”
“Don’t count on it! I’d keep quiet, if I were you,” said George, rubbing his bottom with his back legs rememberingly.
After a while they got hungry again, and that reminded them what they’d come out for.
They spotted a young toad squatting near a patch of wet ground where the Hoo-Min had been watering its garden.
They raced each other up to the toad. It tried to hop away, but they caught it, overpowered it with their poison-claws, and were soon dragging it back to their tunnel.
By the time Harry and George got home, Belinda was better. She’d got up and was waiting for them.
“My wonderful centis!” she said, and gave them a centi-kiss with her feelers. “Thank you for helping me home! And now, I want to hear everything.”
Harry’s wish to tell his mother everything had gone. He didn’t know quite how she’d take it. So he said, “Er – well, we spotted this toad, and—”
“No, No! When you went Up the Up-Pipe!”
“Oh, that.”
“Of course I know you were both lucky and didn’t meet a Hoo-Min, or you wouldn’t have come back alive.”
“You did, Mama,” said Harry.
“I did?” asked Belinda, puzzled.
“When you went up. When you were young.”
Belinda crouched down and they saw her feelers quiver. “That was very different. Your father was with me.”
Harry stiffened with astonishment.
“My father?” He hadn’t known he had a father. He’d never heard about him.
“I meant to tell you when you were older,” said Belinda. “I didn’t want to make you sad.”
She looked so sad herself that Harry was afraid to hear, but he had to. “Tell me now, Mama!”
