The great white lazed below, at thirty feet. With a swish of his tail he turned sidewise, spiraling upward. His jaws opened at ten feet, and by five feet he was making a good ten knots, straight up. He took the baby whole, rose into the black night, and scissored the tail from the mother on the buoy.

He waited while she thrashed and fell from her perch, then engorged her in one piece.

With half his hunger satisfied, he glided for a while.

Because he was so heavy and because his kind had no air bladder like other fish, he would sink to the bottom if he ever stopped swimming. There he would drown when the water stopped flowing past his gills. He was doomed to a life of restless motion, like a bird with no place to alight.

Hearing a piling bumping against a channel buoy, he turned toward the lights of the harbor and swam in.

***

Ellen Brody, carrying a grocery bag from Fieldstone's Market, crossed the square, glancing up at the township Christmas tree.

The last of the sunlight glittered from the bedraggled angel teetering on top. Her son Sean, an Amity policeman, had put it there the previous week, rather poorly, and she was surprised that it had survived yesterday's snowstorm.

SEVEN SHOPPING DAYS TILL XMAS, flashed a sign on Lautzhauser's Men's Store.

The Christmas-tree lights flickered on, off, and on again. The same lights that had always seemed so cheerful and full of hope seemed suddenly drab and dreary. A lonely silver bell tinkled in the boughs, dangling in the sea breeze, and the foghorn groaned.

She sighed. All day long she had been filled with sadness and some nameless dread, perhaps of loneliness. This was the first Christmas she would bear without Marty. Her elder son, Michael, was in the Bahamas, and Sean and she would be alone.

Martin Brody had first placed the angel on the tree, forty feet above the ground, when Sean was a child. Marty, with his silver star glittering in sunlight and his visored cap askew, had climbed the volunteer fire company's hook and ladder. Singing "Silver Bells" at the top of his voice, he teetered wildly at the peak, pretending drunkenness. The aldermen had shaken their heads below, muttering darkly. Michael had burned with embarrassment, and she and Sean had cheered.

Almost twenty years ago. And then, each year he had made a better show of it, until finally she grew frightened that he really would fall down.

All that before the Troubles, before the sharks. The first of the Troubles—the shark that had almost wrecked the town—had come twelve years ago, and the next, which had all but finished the job, two years after that. Sean had been barely ten. After that shark there had been no more climbing of the Christmas tree for Marty: His heart would not permit it, nor would she.