“Cut it the fuck out!” Ig yelled, heart throbbing in his chest.

Kids, he thought, got to be fucking kids. But he didn’t believe it. If it was kids, why weren’t they laughing? Why weren’t they dropping out of the tree and sprinting away in a state of high hysterics?

Ig was dressed and ready, and he grabbed the chair to push it aside-then realized he was afraid to. He held up, staring at Merrin, who had frozen in the act of pulling on her sneakers.

“Go on,” she whispered. “See who’s out there.”

“I don’t want to.”

He really didn’t. His heart quailed at the thought of moving aside the chair and letting in whoever (whatever) was out there.

The worst of it was the sudden quiet. Whoever had been pitching themselves into the trapdoor had quit, waiting for them to open it of their own volition.

Merrin finished tugging on her sneakers and nodded.

Ig called out, “Listen, if there’s someone down there…you had your fun. We’re good and scared.”

“Don’t tell him that,” Merrin whispered.

“We’re coming out now.”

“Christ,” Merrin hissed. “Don’t tell him that either.”

They traded a glance. Ig felt a rising dread, did not want to open the door, was seized with the irrational conviction that if he did, he would allow in something that would do them both irreparable harm. And at the same time, there was nothing to do but open the door. He nodded at her and shoved back the chair, and as he did he saw that something else was written on the inside of the trap, big capital letters in white paint, but he didn’t pause to read what it said there, only flung back the hatch. He leaped down, not wanting to give himself time to think, grabbing the edge of the trap and lashing out with his legs, hoping to drive anyone who was on the branch off it, and fuck ’em if they broke their necks. He had assumed that Merrin would stay behind, that it was simply his role as the man to protect her, but she was going through the trapdoor with him and actually put her feet down on the branch below the tree house first.

Ig’s heart was beating so fast that the whole world seemed to jump and twitch around him. He settled onto the branch beside her, his arms still reaching up, hands gripping the edges of the opening. He searched the ground below, breathing hard; she was breathing hard, too. There was no one. He listened intently for the sound of tramping feet, people rushing away, crashing in the brush, but heard only wind, and branches scraping against the outside of the tree house.

He scrambled down out of the branches and made a series of widening circles around the tree, looking in the brush and along the path for signs of passersby, but found nothing. When he returned to the trunk of the tree, Merrin was still up in it, sitting on one of the long boughs below the tree house.

“You didn’t find anyone,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“Nope,” he said. “Must’ve been the big bad wolf.”

It felt right to joke it off, but he was still uneasy, his nerves jangled.

If she was feeling jangled, she didn’t show it. She had a last affectionate look up into the tree house and pulled the door shut. She hopped down out of the branches and scooped her bike up by the handlebars. They began to walk, leaving that bad moment of genuine fright farther behind them with each step. The path was still in the last of the day’s warm, generous light, and Ig became aware again of a pleasant, satisfied, freshly laid tingle. It was a good thing, to walk close to her, their hips almost touching and the sun on their shoulders.

“We’ll have to come back out here tomorrow,” she said, and in almost the same moment Ig said, “We could really do something with that place, you know?”

They laughed.

“We should get some beanbags for up there,” Ig said.

“A hammock. You put a hammock up in a place like that,” she said.

They were quiet, walking.

“Maybe grab us a pitchfork, too,” she said.

Ig stumbled, as if she had not just mentioned a pitchfork but pricked him with one, poking the tines into him from behind.

“Why a pitchfork?” Ig asked.

“To scare away the whatever. In case it comes back and tries to get in at us while we’re naked.”

“Okay,” Ig said, already dry-mouthed at the thought of having her again up on the boards, in the cool-blowing breeze. “It’s a plan.”

But Ig was back in the forest alone two hours later, hurrying along the path through the town woods. He had remembered over dinner that neither of them had blown out the candles in the menorah, and he’d been in a state of high distress ever since, imagining the tree ablaze, the burning leaves drifting into the crowns of the surrounding oaks. He ran, in terror that at any moment he would catch a whiff of smoke.

He smelled only the early-summer fragrances of sun-baked grass and the distant cold, clean rush of the Knowles River, somewhere down the hill from him. He thought he knew exactly where to find the tree house and slowed as he neared the general vicinity. He searched the trees for the dim glow of candle flame and saw nothing but the velvety June darkness. He tried to find that tree, that enormous scaly-barked tree of a kind he didn’t know, but in the night it was difficult to tell one leafy tree from another, and the trail didn’t look the same as it had in the daylight. Finally he knew he had gone too far-way too far-and he started for home, breathing hard and proceeding slowly. He went back and forth on the trail, two, three times but couldn’t find any sign of the tree house. He decided at last that the wind had blown the candles out, or they had guttered out on their own. It had always been a little paranoid to imagine them starting a forest fire. They were set in a heavy iron menorah, and unless it fell over, there wasn’t much chance of them igniting anything. He could find the tree house another time.

Only he never did, not with Merrin and not on his own. A dozen afternoons he searched for it, walking the main trail and all the offshoots, in case they had somehow wandered onto a side path. He looked for the tree house with a methodical patience, but it wasn’t to be found. They might as well have imagined the place, and in fact, in time, this was exactly what Merrin concluded: an absurd hypothesis but one that suited both of them. It had simply been there for an hour, one day, when they needed it, when they wanted a place to love each other, and then it was gone.

“We needed it?” Ig said.

“Well,” Merrin said, “I needed it. I was horny as hell.”

“We needed it, and it appeared. A tree house of the mind. The temple of Ig and Merrin,” Ig said. As fantastic and ludicrous as it seemed, the notion gave him a shiver of superstitious pleasure.

“That’s my best guess,” she said. “It’s like in the Bible. You can’t always get what you want, but if you really need something, you usually find it.”

“What part of the Bible is that from?” Ig asked her. “The Gospel of Keith Richards?”