Week 47 · English Practice Paper

Reading Passage

A strange shell has washed up against the harbour wall at Widmouth after a night of storms. A crowd has gathered on the quay to watch as it begins to open.

What Came Ashore

The shell had been lying half-submerged at the end of the breakwater since the storm the night before, and by the time I reached the harbour wall a good crowd had already gathered along it, held back by nothing more than their own uncertainty. Nobody had gone close. Even the fishermen, who joked about everything, stood in silence, watching a thin seam along the shell's curved side where something was working itself outward from within. There came a sudden crack, sharp as a rifle shot, and a plate of blackened casing dropped away and slid into the water with a splash that made half the crowd flinch backwards as one. I had shoved myself right to the front rail, and I very nearly lost my footing in the scramble that followed.

Everyone, I think, expected something recognisable to climb out — a diver, perhaps, or some poor sailor thrown overboard in the storm. I know I did. But looking into the gap left by the fallen plate, I saw only a stirring greyish dimness, and then, quite distinctly, two pale, glassy circles that caught the last of the evening light. Something long and pale uncoiled from the shadow beneath them, no thicker than a broom handle, and swayed upright in the open air before curling back out of sight.

A woman near me screamed, short and sharp, and that seemed to break whatever spell had held the crowd still. People surged backwards along the harbour wall, some running properly now, others simply stumbling away without looking where they put their feet. I found myself alone at the rail almost before I noticed the crowd thinning, gripped by a horror I couldn't name and yet somehow unable to make myself move. I watched a boy fall from the wall into the shallows below the breakwater, and heard the others simply keep running.

A great bulk, dull and glistening like wet slate, rose slowly out of the broken shell. It caught the light strangely as it moved, less like skin than like something poured and left to set. Two eyes, set wide apart in a face that was barely a face at all, fixed on the harbour with what felt uncomfortably like attention. Beneath them a slit of a mouth worked steadily open and shut, and a thin trail of moisture ran from one corner of it. The whole mass of the thing pulsed as though it were breathing through every part of itself at once.

Nobody who has never stood in front of such a creature can properly imagine the particular horror of it. The eyes were too large and too still; the skin had a slick, mottled sheen that made me think of things left too long in standing water; every movement it made seemed to cost it a visible effort, as though our air itself were too thin, or our gravity too strong, for whatever place it had come from. There was nothing about it I could compare to any living thing I already knew, and that, more than anything else, was what turned my stomach.

I turned then, at last, and ran for the trees at the top of the beach path, though I stumbled twice and could not stop myself from glancing back over my shoulder as I went. From there, crouched among the gorse with perhaps thirty others scattered along the path in twos and threes, I watched the broken shell and waited, not quite able to look away, though every part of me wanted to.

The light was almost gone by the time I saw it: a thin, jointed rod rising slowly out of the shell, higher than a man, bearing at its tip some manner of disc that turned lazily against the darkening sky. It caught the last light once, twice, and then the dusk swallowed it entirely, leaving only the sound of the sea and, somewhere behind me, someone quietly beginning to cry. What that rod was for, I could not begin to guess.

Option 1: Imagine that you are standing at the harbour wall and you feel only curiosity about the creature, with no fear or disgust at all. You approach the shell. How do you address the creature, and what do you say? You can assume that the creature understands English.

• Keep a consistent, curious tone throughout.
• Think carefully about how you would greet and question something entirely unfamiliar.

Option 2: Imagine that you are the creature. Write a letter home, giving your first impressions of Planet Earth. You can assume that the creature can write English. Write between one and two pages.

• Write from the creature's point of view, describing Earth as genuinely strange to it.
• Try to give the creature its own distinctive voice and way of seeing things.