"Louisa?" Mike strode toward the shack in the clearing.

***

The great white shark, far out on Masthead Sound, swam silently, listening as only his species could: totally, from the tip of his nose to his pointed tail.

His ears were tiny ducts, invisible to man, but inside them lay three chambers. Each was tuned exquisitely by the aeons to the scale of an oceanic symphony that ranged from the deep bass groans of the humpback whales to the chittering of shrimp.

In each chamber was a calcified ear stone, connected to hairlike, sensory cells. Vibrations of a thrashing fish or a lumbering elephant seal would set the stones to oscillating, the sensory cells to resonating, and the shark himself to closing on the source.

His tiny ears were backed up by the lateral canal system just below his skin. They picked up pulsations in the tiniest motions of the slowest prey.

He was unsleepingly alert every second of his life, from birth to death.

Now, as he cruised, tortured by the point of the harpoon, his pygmy ears picked up the reverberations of an incessant booming near the shore.

Once, when he was half his present size, he had heard a similar pounding: a pile driver on a barge, driving logs into the sand of Boston Harbor.

And only a few weeks back, zeroing in on the ceaseless sound of a drifting pile against a buoy had given him a meal in Amity Bay.

On this night the sound was so faint at first that he ignored it. But when it continued, he stopped swimming.

He glided for a moment. Then he turned toward shore.

The boom... boom... boom... ahead of him grew louder in his ears.

***

Ellen Brody, halfway up the beach, stirred a clump of brush with her foot, looking for Thea's bucket in the moonlight.

A strange hour. The nightmare was still with her. She shivered. What was she doing, past midnight, looking for a child's bucket on a foreign beach?

The slow, alien drumbeat from Neptune's Folly was growing louder. She looked at the dock. She could see Carla walking on it, toward the boat.

The moon was flirting with the clouds now. She saw Thea standing by the castle, staring out at Masthead Sound.

Thea was acting oddly, but so was everyone else. The next day's sun would burn it out of them, and the festivities at the plaza would do the rest.

She heard splashing. She stared. Thea was wading out into the water. At night? A cold chill struck her soul.

"Thea!" she called. "Come back!"

Her voice sounded tinny and weak in her ears. Something strange was happening. Her legs began to twitch. Some kind of stroke?

"Thea!" she called again. The little girl turned. Her distant face, bright in the moonlight, was blank, and her eyes were empty.

Thea pointed to the water. Faintly Ellen could hear her voice. "... floating away. I have to get it."