Free Hide Your Eyes by Alison Gaylin Page B

‘What I’m trying to figure out right now is why you chased me three blocks in the freezing cold with no coat on, just to tell me stuff I already know.’

    ‘To tell you stuff you already know,’ he repeated - or replied, I wasn’t sure. My headache was back again, and I felt a dull pain at the core of my stomach. If there were two things I didn’t need, they were a beer on top of a cheese omelet and the company of this kid.

    ‘Thanks for the warning,’ I said. ‘I have to go now.’

    I started to put my coat back on, but he grabbed my arm. Tredwell’s grip was surprisingly strong. ‘There’s more,’ he said. ‘It’s just a little difficult to express.’

    ‘I’ll give you thirty seconds.’

    ‘I’m not totally gay.’

    ‘Okay . . .’

    ‘But I used to . . . I used to be with Peter. And . . . and he made me . . . do things I didn’t want to do.’ Tredwell eased me back onto the barstool.

    ‘What kind of things?’

    ‘Name it,’ he said. ‘Drugs I’d never done before. K. Crystal meth. Lots and lots of amyl.’ He watched my face warily, like he expected it to detonate.

    ‘I’m pretty sure Yale is beyond drug peer pressure.’

    ‘The amyl was for the sex. Because it kills the pain—’

    ‘All right, now you’re giving me too much information.’

    ‘No, wait. This is important . . . Peter got me to . . . experience real pain.’ He glanced at the bartender, then leaned in close. ‘Peter hurt me,’ he whispered. ‘I let him.’

    Tredwell stared at me so intently that I had to look away. ‘I didn’t want to, but I did. It was like I . . . couldn’t move.’

    There was a sudden, strange intimacy between us - between me and this twenty-year-old, one-named guy who had spilled coffee on me less than half an hour earlier - and it made me feel raw and embarrassed. ‘He hurt you,’ I said, more to myself than to him.

    Tredwell rubbed his eyelids with his palms. ‘He’d look at you, look inside you more like . . . and you’d be forced into doing whatever he said. Bondage. S and M. . .’

    I put a hand on his arm, frail as a bird’s wing under the long white sleeve.

    ‘I have scars.’

    ‘It’s okay,’ I said, like you would to a frightened child. ‘It’s okay, honey.’

    Tredwell drew a shallow, trembling breath and placed his hand over mine. His palm was cold and sweaty.

    ‘What, honey? You can tell me.’

    Suddenly, he squeezed my hand so hard it hurt. When he looked up at me, I noticed his eyes were wet. ‘Peter convinced me to worship Satan.’

     
    I couldn’t believe I was going to actually say the words Satan worship to anyone, much less a cop, but I was.

    What I’d seen at the river had been Peter and a woman involved in a Satanic rite. I was now sure of it. I remembered the scraping sound I’d heard, the ice chest’s heaviness. It had been small, but la K smritrge enough to hold a severed body part, or a collection of them. I remembered the woman’s exposed arms, shaking uncontrollably. Shaking like Tredwell’s hand.

    Back at Cheap Trix, I’d stared at Tredwell, who, like the woman, wore clothes that surrendered his body to the cold. I’d looked at his red apron and recalled the woman’s red dress. I’d listened to him tell me about Black Masses and inverted crosses and red robes and red candles ‘signifying virgin blood’ and thought of all that red light in Ruby’s, how comfortable Peter had seemed there. I’d remembered the bloodred pentagram branded into Peter’s neck, and how he’d laughed at me for trying to blind the devil, and the question had floated out of my mouth so effortlessly, like a ghost: Did you and Peter ever sacrifice anything?

    And Tredwell had said nothing, just looked away.

    ‘Sorry to freak you out. I just wanted to warn your friend,’ he told me after we left the bar. ‘I was Peter’s slave, and I’m not anymore, so he’s looking for a new one.’

    I envisioned the woman again, trembling in her