Epigraph

"The sea never changes and its works, for all the talk of men, are wrapped in mystery."

-Joseph Conrad, "Typhoon"

"In addition to eyesight that is better than we thought it was, a phenomenal sense of hearing, and the ability to sense vibrations in the water, sharks have chemical and electrical receptors that are unequaled in the animal kingdom."

-Richard Ellis, The Book of Sharks

Part I

PART I

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

On an evening a week before Christmas a famished gull stood on an icy piling in Amity Harbor. For a moment, gold from the setting sun touched its sleek white breast. It pecked at its gilded feathers, as if surprised, then glimpsed the flash of cod in the depths.

Instantly it gathered itself to forage. But it sensed something it did not like beneath the surface. It cawed sharply, spread its wings, and swooped off hungry toward its nest on Amity Rock.

The light on the Rock—untended now for many years—was turning tirelessly. On the cliff below it an automatic sensor felt the evening fog gathering, and every three seconds the Amity horn began to moan.

***

Random impulses had lured the great white shark to warmer, shallow water from his feeding grounds off Montauk Point, as man himself was sometimes tempted to the sea.

He moved slowly through the ebony waters of Amity Bay. He was twenty-eight feet long and weighed three thousand pounds.

His flat dish-eyes were as black as the night. They were entirely without pupils but strangely knowing. Though they were as useless after dark as the eyes of any other fish, he had no need for them.

For, day or night, he was exactly attuned to his surroundings. He knew within centimeters how far it was to the rusting hood of an ancient car half buried in the mud, and where a sunken dory lay. He sensed a moray slithering from its cave a thousand yards away, and lobsters stirring in the co-op's lobster pots.

All of this he knew from receptors refined from three hundred million years of evolution. Though his kind had diminished in size—his ancestor, Megalodon, had jaws wide enough to swallow a modern cow—its senses had only improved.

A female fur-seal circled the Amity outer bell buoy, evaluating it as a haven. She was en route with her little one from her Arctic rookery to her winter fishing grounds off Sandy Hook.

Now, for reasons she could not understand, she was uneasy. She wanted suddenly to leave the water, but she doubted that her baby had the strength to mount the buoy.

She could only demonstrate, and hope. Gauging the swell, she dived and crested on a wave. In a surge of power she heaved herself aboard, scraping belly fur on rusted rivets. She barked at her little one to follow.

The baby missed the swell, pawed with her flippers at the edge, flopped back, and tried again. Above them, the deep bell gonged.