THE BEGINNING

      Seventeen candles would be enough, thought Fisher (Fish) Wood. He silently stuffed them inside a folded army blanket and checked the bundle on both ends before picking it up. The attic was mostly dark except for a cold, dimly lit area around the window. Fisher stood at the edge of this light with his hidden candles and watched large, ragged snowflakes hurry across the square of outside afternoon; some of them climbed up the window, and once a pinwheel of snow came together in the upper right-hand corner. He was old enough to think that snow acted oddly when seen from the attic window because of wind getting trapped under the eaves of the roof. He carefully set down the blanket and tried for a final time to open the window, being quiet. No, seventeen candles would be enough, he thought. They would have to be . . . everything else of value was too large to be taken directly out of the house, and the noise of hammering, which was what it would take to open the window, would draw attention and his stupid sister might come upstairs. He pulled the cardboard box farther into the light and punched more holes in it with a nail, for air. Though birds were not necessarily afraid of the dark, Fisher reasoned, they could very well be afraid of the inside of cardboard boxes. Speed was essential. He would be back.

      Fisher put on his rubbers, a tremendous winter coat, a Russian-like protective hat, leather gloves, and a scratchy scarf from Marshall Field’s in Chicago. He picked up the folded blanket and began a silent descent down the thickly carpeted staircase, letting his right hand slide easily down the brass banister rail, noticing in horror that the door at the bottom was ajar. He heard the toilet flush and stopped, keeping well back away from the partially opened attic door. Stupid, he thought, leaving a door open, and tightly concentrated on his breathing. Eight Wood left the bathroom in a businesslike manner, shutting the attic door with a casual kick from the side of her foot, and went down the red-and-gold hall and into her room. Fisher heard the stately click of the chrome-plated door handle.

      It was not as though the attic door had been shut in his face (he was a good three feet from it); it was that a member of his family could be so much like his sister Eight, could walk by a partially opened attic door and not notice it . . . no! notice it and shut it! That she could care so little about the real things, the mysteries and murders. Fisher felt he had been humiliated. With a bird in the attic and someone stealing candles, she had shut the door. He waited until his anger went back up into the attic, for fear his mother would see it and have reason to waylay him from going outside—asking him questions about his face, which, when angry, resembled his father’s normally haggard expression—then he opened the door, moseyed on by Eight’s room and down the stairs.

      His mother was in the kitchen and he had to go through it. He had expected this and was prepared. In a single glance she could tell if he was sufficiently clothed; all he needed to do was get close enough to the door so that she had time to see the clothes, but not enough time to ask about the blanket or the remnants of his anger. Arness, the maid, was in the kitchen too, and he used her body as a foil in order to cross half the length of the kitchen before coming into complete view of his mother. Another four feet and Mrs. Rabbit Wood saw him. Fisher’s face fixed itself into a look of belligerent concentration, an attitude of disguise that always made his parents think, “Children are always having secrets, secrets that amount to nothing . . . better to leave alone.”

      “Where are you going, Fisher?” she asked, just as he arrived at the door.

      “Outside,” mumbled Fisher, and was gone into the snow.

      “He’s got a blanket!” said Arness, looking out the window above the sink. “What do you think—”

      “Another trade,” said Ester Wood. “He’s got something he wants from Easter’s Yard, and there’s something wrapped up in the blanket to trade for it. He wears that scarf to be invisible.”

      Fisher ignored one of his father’s neighbors who called from the open window of his automobile, “Hey, Fisher, where you going with that blanket?” pretending that the snowstorm made hearing not necessary. He walked six blocks, his tracks leveling off behind him.

      There was only one house in Ontarion, Iowa, larger than Rabbit Wood’s. Not only was it the largest house, it was the only house with an entire square block to itself. It was built in the middle of four acres of metal rubbish, old cars, washing machines, railroad ties, furnaces, radios, bathtubs, sinks, muskrat traps, threshing machines, elevators, wheels, stoves, doorknobs, refrigerators, typewriters, and, as far as Fisher knew, everything. The house had not probably come after the junk, but if the townspeople—other than that handful living inside the gray, pillared house—could have wished away either the Yard or the house, they would have moved the house very far away. They were afraid of it.

      There were other differences between the two houses; one was a fine, immaculate house with aluminum windows, a house precise in all ways. The other was not, and Fisher had to step over a sign that had fallen from the porch roof: EASTER’S YARD. He knocked on the door. Someone from inside called for him to come on. He removed his rubbers, went in, and hoped, like all of Ontarion, that he might catch a look at The Baron, an odd child believed to be three years older than himself, who never came out of his room upstairs on the third floor, and who was crazy and probably chained up and tortured by his mother, mad as well, and frightening.

      “Fish,” said C Easter, shoving his head out backward through the doorway of the Associate office, as though he were leaning back in a swivel chair. “What