Free The Missing by Sarah Langan Page A

was to her, and he continued to slam his hands against the plastic ma- chine.
    “Albert!” Sheila mimicked in hysterical singsong: “Al-bert! Al-bert!” Then Bram and Joseph, the other two locals that made up the mental illness quartet she’d been abetting at the Corpus Christi Library, started shouting, too. The reference department was a sudden chorus, and she felt like queen of the loonies.
    Across the library, parents quietly exited with toddlers in their arms. None of them, sadly, would be checking out or returning any books today. “I’m sorry,” she mur- mured to Christen Fowler, who shook her head while walking out with her son, like it was Meg who was caus- ing the ruckus.
    After a while, Albert got tired and stopped banging. Sheila kept screaming his name until Meg shot her the scariest look she could muster: a knit-eyebrow, pruned- lip combo. Then she turned back to Albert, but was careful to keep her distance. “What’s eating you?” she asked.
    Albert was panting from fright, or exertion, or both. “So itchy. On the inside!” he hissed. “ Hey-ohhhh, stop digging! ”
    “Let’s go outside, Albert. We’ll take a walk.” She tried to keep her voice calm, but it wavered, and she could hear her own fright. He was, literally, twice her size.
    Albert’s eyes were bloodshot from booze. “In my bones it itches. All my places that count. How could that little boy do something so bad?” He came toward her. She thought of the candy striper and covered her throat.
    “Molly!” she yelled. “Now. Nine-one-one. Now.” Molly blinked but didn’t move. In her peripheral vision she saw Lina Varvaran’s father, Rich, pull a cell phone out of his pocket. He stood in the doorway of the build- ing with his daughter to get better reception.
    There were cuts along the tips of Albert’s fingers. Blood had gathered there with such force that his skin had burst open. He was panting and wet with sweat. Slowly his body eased back into the chair, and she hoped he’d spent himself into exhaustion. She decided it was safe and felt his forehead for a temperature. His skin was clammy and cold, but her touch calmed him, and he visibly relaxed. “Does the itch feel like bugs on your skin?” she asked.
    Albert shook his head. There were tears in his eyes. She felt very sorry for him just then. As if in some other dimension there was a clean-cut Albert Sanguine who was building bridges and raising a family, but in this one, all the cards he’d been dealt were unlucky.
    His pupils got big, so that his eyes looked black in- stead of brown. “Let me go. Please, Ms. Wintrob,” he muttered so quickly that it could have been one long tick.
    “Have you had a drink today? Some of that bread?” she asked. “Do you need one?”
    He shook his head. “Itches so bad. Like when your foot is rotting, and the moss grows inside where it doesn’t belong. Hurts so bad.” He was crying.
    Meg pulled Albert’s chin between her fingers and looked into his eyes. Even though he was sitting, her
    body was dwarfed next to his. “Pull yourself together,” she said. “I mean it.”
    “It’s awake,” he whispered, and a chill ran down her spine. What was awake? The demon inside him that drove him to drink? For one frenzied moment she won- dered: What if this voice he’s been raving about these fifteen years is real?
    His pupils got even bigger, until no white was left. A seizure? She didn’t know. But suddenly his breath came easy. His posture stiffened. Even his tremors were gone. He was different. She couldn’t explain how she knew this, but it was true. Albert Sanguine had left the build- ing. At first she was too sad to be frightened. The booze had finally gobbled the remains of Albert’s soul, and the last spark of his personality was gone.
    “Albert?” she asked.
    It happened fast. He squeezed her upper arms with bloody hands. She struggled to get away, but he was strong. As he pulled her between his legs, he flexed his