Book of Horror Stories

Graphite

The scratching of graphite on paper. The short, whispered phrases. The gentle, distant ticking of a muffled old grand-father clock. These are my recollections of my time talking to Thomas Berkley in January, 1980.

I was called in to see Mr Berkley at short notice. My time in Boston was brief, but just two days before I was supposed to leave, I was contacted by a colleague of mine employed at the Enfield Sanatorium with the details of a rather peculiar case which, he suspected, would pike my curiosity. It did.

Mr Berkley had not talked in 18 years by that point. Before his internment at the facility, he had been an electrician of some success, running his own business out of a small, modest rental unit down on the East bank of the river. At 32 he married a woman named Harriet Jameson and, a year later and just two months before he was taken in by my colleague, they were given a baby girl, who they named after Thomass mother, Nancy.

One afternoon in August, when the mercury peaked at 93 degrees, Thomas Berkley disappeared. He had been walking through Boston Common where he stopped at a café, presumably to visit the restroom. Witnesses reported seeing him enter, marked out in their memories by his red hair and pencil moustache, but not seeing him exit.

The alarm was first raised when Berkley did not arrive for his 4:15 appointment at the doctors (he was usually fastidiously punctual), at which point the family doctor called Harriet. For the next few weeks, she searched everywhere she could for Thomas, all the while desperately trying to look after their baby daughter. She got the police involved on the second day and, while they did their best, searching as much of the local area as possible and interviewing witnesses, every lead they followed turned up cold. After a week, police involvement was severely stepped down. After three weeks, the search was called off.

That evening, a dejected Harriet Berkley walked home, heartbroken at what (she assumed) was her husband running out on her and leaving her alone with Nancy. Slowly and sullenly, cradling a child who cried whenever the wind picked up a little and brought a chill reminder of imminent autumn to her cheek, she walked down Dartmouth Street towards the river and came to a stop outside the door to their small apartment.

There was a man curled up on the step. He was naked save for a thin piece of dirty cardboard that he fiercely clung to himself. Nowhere on his body could a single hair be seen growing, and his skin was ugly and burned, blistering painfully in places where the dull red flesh flared up into yellow, pustulent time bombs. Gently, she laid a single tender hand on his shoulder and the man bucked and reared, back arching in pain as he swerved around. With a sharp cry of horror, Nancy saw that this man, under his melted flesh and scarred face, was her husband and, worse, that there was fear in his eyes.

The doctors did their best to help him. Over the course of the next few months, he stayed at the Massachusetts General Hospital at Cambridge Street, where he was treated for his burns and given an in depth medical examination. Aside from the superficial burns and scars, though, Thomas Berkley seemed uninjured and, once he had recovered from the external damage, they had no choice but to release him.

According to Harriet, he had seemed alright in the car on the way home, if a little jumpy at times and, when not terrified and paranoid, at the very least pensive. In all the time that he had been kept in the burns ward, he had not said a word, other than certain terrified screams at the sight of needles (he had no such fear before). She seemed to think that he simply needed to recover from whatever shock he was dealing with and hed eventually open up to her.

When they got home, she left him alone for a couple of minutes in order to tend to Nancy. While she changed the babys diaper, she heard a thud from the other room.