There's A Hole. . .

Little else of the world's true atrocities are known to me in any measure. But I know that what I can imagine, the visions that come to me, are no worse than what exists.

In my mind's eye, her mother is preparing to bathe her, a travesty at her age. She is carefully undressing her with all the tenderness of a bored night-nurse, lifting the heavy arms, unbuttoning the ugly, coarse blouse, stripping down the skirt and fat elastic garters so the functional fleshy stockings bulge like rolls of dough around her ankles.

Then, as she lowers young Evelyn bodily into the shallow bath, Mabel Fowler notices the way the water sparkles in the light of the bathroom's single bare bulb. Mabel does not think of the beauty of the dancing reflections. She does not even notice at this moment the way the light shows in gleams of brightness, and not only around her daughter's pasty form.

Droplets from the washcloth in Mae's outstretched hand roll down Evvie's over-developed chest and into the rolls of the child's belly to drip into the bath-water below. Mae hears the sound before she identifies it, and then can only stare, prodding Evvie to arch her back up from the few inches of lukewarm liquid displaced by her thick calves.

She sees then, reminds herself that she is a good Christian woman, and sees it still - the water, rolling into the navel, and through.

Maybe, maybe the phenomena had gone unnoticed for weeks. But tonight, in the light of that single, unforgiving bulb, in the oppressive silence of the Fowler house, a drip of water revealed one of nature's oddest aberrations.

It's hard to say when it began - I am more unwilling to imagine phantom timelines than to intrude on the privacy of Evvie's momentous bath - but I am struck by the startling coincidence of the dates. So near, only days after Marlene left Wiltonby for good, this is what my mind conjures for me. This is the day that Mae Fowler rang to tell me her daughter Evvie had developed a hole where her belly-button should be.

"Hole?" I repeated over the perpetual static on the line. Mae had never struck me as a particularly swift person, so I tried to examine her frantic statement in that light. "She's supposed to have something of a hole there, Mae. Where the umbilical cord was attached."

"No, Miz Barchell, nothing like that." Mae was near tears, I guessed, stoically holding out against the onslaught of passion like the contorted saints and martyrs who decorated her grey sitting room.

"Well, what then? Mae? Do you have her there? Describe it to me."

Mae paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was filled with a kind of religious awe. "She's got an 'ole, gone straight through. You can see the light through t'other side. Size o'pound coin."

Evelyn Fowler was, I think, no idiot. There was nothing wrong with her mentally. She was overweight, but many girls her age are and manage to hold their own. It was so much more than some physical thing. It was something far deeper, that tragic scarring of her emerging psyche. A pallor hung over her, and through my long-time acquaintance with the family, I could swear it only darkened with age.

As the years passed, and Evvie grew from a melancholy child into a passively morose adolescent, I began to wonder if I should in some way intervene. I felt helpless, as always, in respect to the private lives of my patients. Even after seventeen years in England, I was still treated as very much the foreigner. It wasn't unusual to overhear comments about "that new lady doctor from Canada", even from someone who'd lived in Wiltonby a shorter time than me.

It was because of my outsider status, however, that I could become intimately knowledgeable about all the most sordid affairs of my patients; they all considered me a tourist, just passing through.

It was in this way that I became involved with Marlene Saint-John.

Marlene was a beautiful girl with features soft around meltingly brown eyes. Her hair was naturally fair, providing a startling contrast with her dark eyes and her perpetual tan. She gave the impression of old money, of the wintering-in-Barbados sort, and her misty coolness added to the illusion of frigid disdain I built around her. On the day she approached me, she wore a stylish but ultimately conservative dress, knee-length with Peter Pan collar, and creme gloves which I considered positively frumpish on such a young woman.

It was only a fortnight before Mae called me, panicked over Evvie's strange complaint. I was eating lunch in our local pub and society meeting place, the Green Glen. I had never been formally introduced to Marlene, as she patronized a private doctor in London, but I knew who she was. In a town as small as Wiltonby, gossip is as free as the air and near as the next conversation, and no one is precisely a stranger.

Marlene, I knew, was the wife of a prominent builder, Andrew Saint-John, who was, among other things, responsible for the grotesque new shopping mall which was supposed to bring Wiltonby into the new millennium. Like all its brethren, the mall was a blight on the landscape, out of place in the ancient countryside, and just the kind of thing I had left Canada so many years before to escape. It was whispered the union between Andrew and Marlene owed itself to something other than love, that it had been forced on them through circumstances I could only guess at - as there was no child, after all. What I learned from Marlene was no more specific, but revealing all the same. Seven years of marriage, according to her, had been nothing more than the gestation of his dislike. He fed on her weaknesses, and lived for her humiliation. Only after all these cold years had her own instincts for self-preservation become active, and although I was no psychiatrist - Wiltonby had no such thing - I was the only person Marlene imagined she could turn to for advice.

"It was if," she told me, her hands clasped with utter gravity before her on the Green Glen's white linen, "his sole purpose became, from the day we wed, to strip away any vestige of self-worth I possessed. You may not know this, but I was once a designer in London. Andrew brought me here, and I have not since been able to pick up brush nor pen. I feel completely dependent on him; he allows me nothing of my own."

And here, she lowered her head, brown eyes brimming with the tears she had lost the ability to control.

I don't know what we talked about then, or on any of the handful of other visits Marlene made to my office during the following week. Certainly, I learned no more of her situation than is recorded above. We spoke no more of Andrew Saint-John. Instead, Marlene asked me to speak of my own life, and the great sense of purpose which had caused me to uproot myself from everything I had known in Canada, bound for this far-off shore. When I could convince her to take over the burden of narrative, she told me about the plans she had half-made before her unfortunate marriage, the dreams she had all but lost.

I lost the sense of the coldness I had imagined in her, but I now thought I understood what I had felt. Not Marlene, not her own aspirations, but the wintry suspension of those same hopes.

I didn't realize how much that single week had been a turning point for her until the note arrived. It came with the afternoon mail, which meant it had probably been posted that morning. It was from Marlene.

The contents were simple: "I have gone to find a better life for myself away from Andrew. I have contacted a lawyer, and she will begin divorce proceedings on my behalf. I never want to see his face again until I can see him pale in helpless rage, standing rightfully accused in front of a judge. Thank you, Doctor Barchell. I don't know what would have happened if you hadn't helped me when I asked. Even then, I could feel myself fading away, banished to nothing..."

It was that last line which came back to me much later. It now strikes me as prophetic.

When Mae called, I went out immediately to examine Evvie at the Fowler home, reinstating briefly that very British custom of the house-calling doctor. Mae would have had nothing else. Whatever disease was attacking her daughter, it would be confined to the house where she had been born.

The hole was the size now of a baby's fist, and it did indeed go directly through her abdomen. Evvie was in no unusual pain; the hole was clean and there was no blood. It was the most extraordinary thing I had ever seen in my twenty- and more years of medicine.

Evvie, at fifteen, was bathed and dressed by her mother every day. She was ungraceful, socially inept, and had no discernible interests or hobbies. Her mother, often in my presence, would tell her she was stupid, that she deserved nothing from the world. Mae Fowler believed that the only way to raise children was to tongue-lash them into pathetic subservience.

From what I could gather, Evvie's older siblings had bucked at this treatment, had deserted the family nest early after more than the usual run-ins with the law, and were seen no more in town.

Evvie, on the other hand, had learned her lessons well, and her own personality, whatever form it may have taken in other circumstances, had sunk lower and lower until it submerged completely.Evvie had faded more by the time I came to visit again two days later. Horrified, ignoring Mae's objections, I had her admitted to Brighton General, the nearest hospital with full facilities. Evvie was quiet during the ambulance ride, and I, crouching beside Mrs. Fowler by her stretcher, asked myself if I had really heard nothing pass the girl's lips in the time of our acquaintance besides the answers to my questions: "Where does it hurt?" "Can you feel this?"

The hole defied explanation. I found myself in the reluctant role of chief consultant to Evvie simply because I was the first doctor to have seen her strange condition. No one was more enlightened than I, and I was not at all

Five days after that, the spreading hole began to interfere with the workings of vital organs, and the end was near.

Once in hospital, Evvie no longer responded to anything. She lay on her bed like some pale fish hauled out of water, dwarfed at last by life-support equipment, and too near death even to gasp.

This, this fatally wounded child, this crushed, hopeless baby, this was criminal! Mae Fowler fussed nearby, hovering, to check that Evvie's underwear was clean, that she hadn't soiled her hospital gown, that she was careful to keep her legs together as she lay. Hospitals afford little enough dignity to the ill, except what a patient can muster for herself. I could see the ability to marshal courage against the onslaught of instruments, the rush of unfamiliar faces, and the relentless ticking of those damn loud clocks was beyond the resources of that broken child fading into the starched hospital sheets.

It would have been much better if Mae had been convinced to leave the room when Evvie's breath became laboured. As far as I was concerned, it would have been better if Mae had been left back at the house. But she was tenacious as a tick, refusing to budge from Evvie's side even to rest her feet in the waiting room. I would have preferred if Evvie's last moments could have been free of what I could only view as a malignant influence.

It was all over too quickly, anyway. The hole had already played havok with her large muscles and intestines, but when it punctured her lung while at the same time touching on the small organs below, there was nothing more anyone could do. She gasped once, then gave up. She sank deeper into the covers and was still.

I was walking through the mall Andrew Saint-John built on the edge of Wiltonby, the first of its kind in this area. Barely half-leased, it has already become something of a hangout for local teens.

I rounded a corner and was suddenly behind a group of young girls, fourteen or fifteen years old, just the same age as Evvie had been. They were dressed in what I could only assume to be the height of fashion and walked in nonchalant indifference.

One girl was saying, "She never washes, and she doesn't wear deodorant."

And another: "Oh yeah, you can always tell."

The first: "And she's always saying she doesn't have any clean clothes. That's what -"

"Your mother's for!" they all finished together, and they laughed.

It was a symphony in cruelty. The girls carried on. I paced them in horrid fascination and before I knew it, the name "Evvie" seemed to have passed some little girl's lips. I had brought it with me into the present tense, as if Evvie were still alive to be ridiculed. Here is the next generation of Mae Fowlers, I remember thinking.

The girls rounded a corner ahead of me, and I found myself afraid to look after them, as if only an empty corridor would stretch there before me. I imagined they were gone, as if they had never existed, as if they were phantoms vanishing back into my mind's eye.

And now I stand in the graveyard where Evvie is buried under a stone set flat in the ground beneath my feet. It is a simple marker, her last name only. I think, uncharitably, that it was probably got at as cheap a price as Mae could find. Already half-overgrown with tough cemetery weeds, it seems a fitting metaphor for the unfortunate life that overwhelmed a young girl. She wasn't a "cow", or "hopeless", or "ever so clumsy," as Mae might have said. No. Evvie was - Evvie could have been something of her own making.

Scrawled on the rough grey stone, over the plain script identifying the body beneath the badly-lain turf, is a motto, written in red crayon. It says simply, "The Potter should be aware of other hands turning the wheel." It seems very apt, especially in light of the envelope in my pocket.

I had already connected Marlene's flight and the death of Evvie Fowler even before the second letter arrived.

"Doctor Barchell," Marlene wrote, "do you know of an ailment where a person begins to fade, to disappear literally from existence? I couldn't tell you before, because I hardly believed it myself. Now, I seem to be cured, and I feel somehow free to speak.

"Two days before I talked to you in The Green Glen, I had noticed something curious about my left hand. The fourth finger, where I wore my wedding ring, had started to fade. I could see right through it."

The letter went on to describe how the divorce was proceeding, and how much fun Marlene was having in London with an old friend. She was no longer the cold, distant creature I had first encountered in the local.

The concluding lines of the letter have given me hope. I don't know yet what report I will make of the strange disease which causes pieces of people in Wiltonby to disappear. I will try to find other cases in town, and the area, to discover this is perhaps a local phenomena. Certainly, it is new to me and all my journals and medical books.

At least, Marlene has given me a step up on most pathological researchers: I know there is a cure! It is attested to by the other contents of Marlene's letter, a child's fat red crayon, and a golden wedding band.