Secret Army - Robert Muchamore Page 0,11
into the kitchen Troy and Mason followed Paul down the hallway and into a ramshackle conservatory at the back of the house. A pair of paraffin heaters filled the space with a sweet smell and kept the temperature close to thirty-five centigrade.
Along the walls lay glass cages. Mason approached and got a fright as he saw a huge hairy-legged spider sitting on the sawdust floor beneath a rotting tree stump.
‘Wow!’ Mason gasped. ‘What are these things?’
‘Tarantulas mostly,’ Paul explained. ‘That’s Mavis, a cobalt blue. You see how the legs and body are bluish and reflect the light?’
‘Can you take him out?’ Troy asked.
‘Her,’ Paul corrected, as he shook his head. ‘The males are smaller and quite dull-looking. You wouldn’t want to handle Mavis. Some spiders only look scary, but cobalt blues are mad. She’ll go crazy for no reason. Her poison isn’t deadly but her fangs are a third of an inch long.’
‘Where’s the biggest one?’ Mason asked as he moved along the cages, closely followed by Troy.
‘The goliath at the bottom is biggest,’ Paul explained. ‘But she hides inside her piece of pipe all the time. Mrs Henderson traps dormice in the fields and gives her one every two or three days.’
‘Why are they here?’ Troy asked.
‘Mrs Henderson worked in the insect house at London Zoo,’ Paul explained. ‘When the war started they were told to kill all the dangerous animals like snakes and scorpions.’
‘Why?’ Mason asked.
‘Well, if a bomb hit the zoo the poisonous animals could escape. But Mrs Henderson didn’t want to all her spiders to die, so she smuggled some of them out. At first she kept them at her flat in London, but now they’re all up here.’
As Paul said this he opened a jam jar filled with live crickets and shook a few into a cage populated by a colony of small orange-legged spiders. After doing this he opened a notebook and logged the time, the cage number and exactly what he’d fed them.
‘You can give a worm to Maxine if you like,’ Paul told Mason. ‘She’s a baby Mexican fireleg. Not very aggressive, but she’s got special hairs on her body that’ll make your skin burn if you touch her.’
‘Eww,’ Mason said, shuddering as Paul plucked a bright-pink earthworm out of a compost drum by the back door and dropped it into the younger boy’s palm.
‘She’s quick, so I’ll take the lid off the cage and you drop it straight in,’ Paul explained, as the worm curled up in Mason’s palm. ‘Ready?’
To everyone’s disappointment, Maxine moved towards the worm but only tapped it disinterestedly before retreating back to the other side of the cage.
‘We’re worried about her,’ Paul explained. ‘Mrs Henderson says the fireleg is a desert spider. The humidity in here is too high for her.’
‘Will she die?’ Troy asked.
‘We’re trying to set up another room that’s hot and dry, maybe in one of the empty cottages,’ Paul explained. ‘The trouble is, the rooms have to be kept warm all the time so you need a fireplace, but you also need sunshine, and Mr Henderson is cross about having one room with spiders in, let alone setting up another one.’
But Troy and Mason had lost interest. They’d caught the smell of bacon and eggs wafting from the kitchen and McAfferty was calling out for someone to come and butter some bread.
CHAPTER SIX
Marc retired to the top bunk after his wash, but he found it hard to relax. He was worried about Henderson, and the blood seeping from his wounded mouth into the back of his throat meant he had to sit up and spit every couple of minutes. After ruling out sleep, Marc squatted by the small window with the light out, peeking behind the blackout curtain.
German bombs were hitting the City of London and the docks several miles to the east, but his window looked north, so although he could hear explosions all he could see were the occasional fire engines rattling through St James’s Square and the vague silhouettes of two elderly men stationed as lookouts on the roof of an office building across the square.
A knock on the door startled Marc and he stubbed his toe painfully on the bedside chest as he crossed the small room in darkness. A slim girl stood at the doorway. No older than seventeen, she wore a black dress with a frilled apron and held a wooden tray on which were placed a steaming bowl of tomato soup and a side plate with