The Drift Page 20

  Eighteen

  THE HATCHMAKER

  As he walked down the stairs, the smell of moldering wood reminded him of his last adventure on The Hatchmaker’s ship. He lifted his lamp. The yellow light made an uneven shadowy glow down the stairs and along the corridors.

  Walking through the rooms and compartments below the second deck he could see that things had changed. The captain’s cabin had been cleaned; the hallways were strewn with chairs that had not been there before. Once more he felt sure that someone lived here. But who? Who was The Hatchmaker? Who was this man no one had ever seen, this creature who produced his impossible sounds at all hours of the day and night?

  The music, if indeed it was music, was very loud now. It seemed to come from everywhere, but after a while he sensed that its source was somewhere below him. After a short search he found a hatchway that led down to the fourth deck.

  Here he was in absolute darkness except for the light from his lamp. Suddenly, with a turn in the corridor, he came upon a torch, fixed to the wall in an iron brazier, that sent a flickering illumination down the passageway. The music seemed very close now. It was no longer a jangling blur of vaguely melodic sounds, but a series of distinctly separate but wavering tones set against a hollow skittering and knocking that made him think of small animals running around in a dark room. He was almost sure now that it was a musical instrument of some kind—perhaps a harpsichord or a piano that was terribly out of tune.

  He opened a door somewhere near the bow of the ship. Inside, the tilted floor was awash with water and a kind of green slime. When the boat heaved a little, the water ran across the floor toward him and then receded to the far side of the room, sloshing against the wall. On the far wall of the large room was another torch mounted in a brazier and another doorway opening into another room. He walked through the lake of green water, stood at the threshold of that doorway, and looked inside. Several moments passed before he realized that he was staring at The Hatchmaker.

  It was a large room filled with boxes, mud, tin cans, rotting clumps of garbage, and strips of newspaper floating in the water like dead whitefish. The overpowering stench held him at the brink of nausea. In one corner of the room sat an ancient grand piano that looked to be nearly ten feet long. Its legs were carved into Corinthian pillars and its feet into the claws of a griffin. The room and the piano seemed somehow familiar. He was sure that in his blind journey two weeks earlier he had been here. He remembered how the legs of the piano had creaked when he had blundered into them in the darkness. But then he had not known what it was.

  On the piano was an old seaman’s lamp, and sitting behind it an incredibly ancient man, who looked even older than Rose. He was dressed in a formal suit of black tails, very worn and very dirty. The old man was playing a four part fugue, perhaps something by Bach, but the notes of the piano wavered like a very bad tape recording; the instrument was so badly out of tune that it was impossible to distinguish any diatonic line of melody or harmony.

  The old man played with great fury. The notes tumbled out of the wrecked piano like inharmonious demons come to plague him. Then he saw Peter standing in the doorway. His ancient hands poised above the piano, trembling, and the music echoed and died in the dark, watery silence. The light from the lamp played across his withered face and left his eyes sunk in deep pools of shadow. He was a ghost, an incredible caricature of a man.

  “Who are you?” said The Hatchmaker. His voice was a piece of tinfoil crinkling in a black box.

  “Peter Sutherland.” He answered in a kind of croak that betrayed his terror. “Who are you?”

  The old man cackled horribly. “Who am I? Who am I, you say? Why I’m The Hatchmaker. Surely you knew that!”

  Peter stared at him. “You’re really The Hatchmaker?” he said finally.

  “Really? In reality? My God, who knows who I really am? I’m nobody, perhaps. A ghost of someone.”

  The old man stood up and sloshed through the greenish water toward him. The light from the two lamps, Peter’s and The Hatchmaker’s, made pools of wavering yellow in a sea of green. Instinctively Peter drew back.

  “Don’t be afraid,” said the old man. “I won’t hurt you. I couldn’t hurt anyone any more.”

  “What are you doing here?” said Peter.

  “I’m playing the piano. I play at least three hours every day. Perhaps you’ve heard me.”

  “Yes,” said Peter. “Everyone hears you.”

  The old man cackled again. “I daresay they wonder what it is,” he said. “The salt air ruined the tone years ago and the sounding board is cracked in a dozen places and the felts are all worn and I have no way to tune it any more. How does it sound to you?”

  “It—it sounds very good,” said Peter.

  “It sounds monstrous,” said the old man. “The strings are snapping one by one. For some notes all three strings are gone. I have no E-flat or D or C any more in the middle register. But I can still hear them in my mind when I play. Perhaps it’s better that way. I can hear the tones very clearly, just as they used to be.”

  The Hatchmaker slowly shook his head back and forth. “But soon all the strings will be gone,” he said.

  “Then what will you do?”

  “Play the piano of course.”

  “Without any strings?”

  “Told you I can hear the notes in my mind. Very curious to know what the Bach chaccone sounds like when there’s just the clicking of the wooden hammers and the sound of the water rolling around in the cabins. Perhaps then I’ll have some peace. The piano will be in tune again and I can play and play until I drop.” He laughed again in his high, breaking voice.

  “And I’ll never hit another wrong note. With no sound there’ll be no wrong notes, don’t you see?”

  Peter stared curiously at the old man. The terror had left him now. In his mind he heard the hollow sound of the wooden hammers striking out at nothing.

  “But I don’t understand why you stay here alone. Don’t you ever get lonely? And what do you eat?”

  “The Outlanders bring me things during the day sometimes, and I come out on deck at night to pick them up. And besides, I’ve hundreds of cans of things that I took before I went into hiding here forty years ago.” The Hatchmaker stared at him and smiled. His eyes glittered in the lamplight. He seemed oddly excited by Peter’s presence.

  “Lonely?” he said. “Of course I get lonely. But what’s out there to relieve a man’s loneliness? A lot of poor fish running around like children. Half of them don’t even know there’s a world beyond The Drift.”

  “They seem to be very happy,” said Peter.

  “They’re happy like moron children,” he answered. “They all make me sick.”

  “Then why didn’t you try to get away?”

  “Tried three times. The first time, my wife and our child were killed in a storm and the boat washed back to The Drift.” The old man began to tremble and tears welled in his eyes.

  “I’m very sorry,” said Peter.

  “That was over forty years ago,” he said. “Don’t remember what they looked like any more. Or even how I felt about them. But I know that her name was Elizabeth and when I say her name over and over again I sometimes hear the rustle of a blue silk dress and then I began to cry. Strange to cry about something you can’t even remember.” The old man was standing very close to him now. Peter could hear the sound of his breathing and see beyond the shadows of his brow into his flittering, unsteady eyes.

  “Second time I tried to get away, the boat sank about a mile out. Third time, I got sick and had to row back. I was alone those last two times. Always alone. Tried hard to get some of the others to help me with one of the big boats. Could have gone to England, but no, they were always too frightened. The sea will get us, they always said. Better just to stay here and wait for help. Fools. They knew there was no help coming. All spineless fools.”

  “What happened then?”

  “They all hated me. Couldn’t stand
being reminded of the other world. Couldn’t stand being reminded they were all cowards. Finally made me stay on one of the small boats.” He burst again into his cackling laughter. “I,” he continued, nearly strangling on his own good humor, “was the first Outlander.”

  “You mean they made you an Outlander just because you tried to get them all to leave The Drift?”

  “That and my grumpy disposition.”

  “And so you escaped and came here?”

  “Came one night and began to play the piano. Everyone thought I was a ghost. Once in a while someone would come to investigate, but I always hid behind the door and hit them over the head with a hammer and threw them into the sea. And then the piano got out of tune and the music began to sound strange and then no one ever came after that. Except once.”

  “Who came?” He listened to the old man’s reedy voice. He had forgotten what time it was.

  “Someone came to The Drift one day in an old fishing boat that had a motor. He had three children and a wife back on The Island of Pennsylvania. He wanted to go back. He came to me. Someone told him I was The God of The Drift and that only I could let him go. I gave him fuel and some cans of beef and sent him away. Everyone saw him leave the next morning. Don’t know if he made it back, but no one ever saw him again.”

  Fuel, thought Peter. Then he stared at the lamp burning on the piano. It smelled of gasoline. “Where did you get the fuel?” he asked.

  “That night before I came here I filled a big raft with food and tools and rope and everything I could think of that I might need. The fools always stay inside at night. It was like stealing pies from kitchen windows. I must have made about seventeen trips.”

  The old man was beginning to tire. He wheezed and made his way back through the green water to his piano. He sat down and rested his head on the music board.

  “How long have you been here?” said Peter.

  “Don’t know,” the old man croaked. “Came in eighteen ninety-three. What year is it now?”

  “Nineteen sixty-seven.”

  “My God,” said the old man, who began to weep again. “All those years. All those wasted years.”

  “How old were you when you came here?” said Peter.

  “I was only twenty-three. Whole life in front of me. I was a pianist going on tour with an orchestra in South America. Our clipper rammed an iceberg in The North Atlantic, but after it split in two the hull kept floating. There were about thirty of us hanging onto that piece of wood for about seven weeks. We managed to salvage some things that were floating around in the water, and it wasn’t too bad until the last seven days or so. Fifteen died the last seven days. Our baby was born right then in the middle of everything. Right there on the side of the hull with all the people around. Somehow we managed to keep it alive. Some of the men wanted—they wanted to eat the baby. You see, we ate the last of our shoes that week and there was nothing else for anyone. But my wife stabbed one of them in the eye with her hatpin and he screamed and fell into the water and after that they all left us alone.”

  The old man began to cry again. “Elizabeth was so brave,” he said. “So fierce and so brave and so loving. Her name was Elizabeth. Did I tell you that? Her name was Elizabeth Harkman.”

  And then for a while the old man said nothing. He played at his piano. The music sounded something like a piano sonata by Mozart that Peter had once played when he was a child, but he could not be sure.

  “How is it out there?” he said when he had finished. “Are any of the old people left?”

  “I don’t know,” said Peter. “Did you know Tabor? Or Bright?”

  “No.”

  “Or Rose?”

  “Rose? Rose Greenwood? Yes, of course I knew Rose. My God, is that old horse still alive? She must be nearly as old as I am. Rose was in love with me after she got over her husband’s death, but God, I could never stand her. Is she still The Great Oracle of The Mary Strattford?”

  Peter smiled. “I guess so.”

  “Yes. That’s Rose. She’ll never change. She can read your mind, you know. The last I heard, twenty years ago, she was teaching all the children to read. minds. That’s what happens when you spend five hundred years away from the world. Everything goes to the mind. She was the most mental woman I ever knew. Ever wonder how people set their watches on The Drift? They ask Rose. Rose tells time by moon and sun and stars. The children used to say that she could change time—make it longer or shorter. I don’t doubt it. She was all mind and intuition, that woman. But in a way she was just like all the others. Weak. Foolish. Afraid of the horizon. Afraid of anything that wasn’t wrecked up on The Drift.”

  Then Peter remembered that Rose had once been Pao’s teacher. What was it Rose had once said about giving Pao all her poor gifts?

  “The Drift was a little different when I was young,” The Hatchmaker was saying. He began to mumble now, talking more to himself than to Peter. “There were some old carracks and even part of a medieval warship over near The Bridge. Things change on The Drift. But the State of Things never changes even if Things do. Hah! You live old but you rot early. All the people, all the boats. Everything slips underwater without really sinking. And everything sinks without really slipping underwater. Does that make sense?” He paused for a moment to tap his fingers. “Can’t be sure,” he said after a moment. “I haven’t thought clearly about anything for years.”

  “But The Drift is very lovely,” said Peter. “I’ve been happy here.”

  “Yes. Very lovely.” The old man coughed and then spit into the water. “Lovely like the white bellies of dead fish floating in the water. Lovely like a green fungus. Listen, boy, you want to know what’s kept me from getting senile all these years? Hate. You don’t get senile as long as you’ve something to hate. I’m insane, you understand. I’ve been quite alone and I’ve read ten thousand books in the last forty years and I’m quite insane. Sometimes I go out in my rowboat at night and howl at people.”

  “But I love one of the girls from The Mary Strattford,” said Peter. It was another part of him now that was speaking, a part that was sinking, receding across a great distance. But in his mind he could still reach out and touch the beautiful image made of water. Pao. The lovely girl who had read his mind.

  “You love her now,” said the old man. “But in twenty-five years she’ll be like Rose. Rose was senile at forty. Never saw the world after a while. Never saw anything outside her own mind. Ever see the old ones sitting around staring at nothing for hours? It’s like their eyes have turned up into their heads. They speak with their minds and they go on dreams together that last for days and days sometimes. And finally that’s all there is. They get fat and they sit there in a pool of their own urine and they smell bad and they dream. And someone comes to feed them. And most of them are not even fifty.”

  Peter remembered the old people sitting in a circle, like children playing shadowgames. He had seen The Long Journey many times.

  “You don’t believe in the value of dreams then?” said Peter.

  “Of course I do, boy. You forget I’m a musician. Music is the dream of sound. It’s a world apart, as they say. Dreams are wonderful things, but not if you live your life so that none of them can ever come true, not even a little. Rose and the others, they ruined everything. If they had all worked together they could have gone home, and Elizabeth and I could have grown old together in England. But no. The old priestess would never allow that. Hah!”

  The Hatchmaker looked up at the walls and ceiling of the compartment and then down at the green water. He smiled a thin, sad smile and then nodded his head. “Once last year,” he said, “I was out on deck at night and I saw a man floating in the weeds. Drowned, but the weeds wouldn’t let him sink. He looked, well, sort of poetic. Peaceful, like he was dreaming of something. The trouble was that he had turned blue and swelled up something awful. Not a pretty sight. Not pretty at all.”

  Peter kept staring at the old man. He stared at the small folds of white ski
n above his eyes, at his jowls and neck, at the deep wrinkles that creased his forehead and cheeks, and he thought about the blue man in the water. Suddenly he felt sick. Suddenly he wanted to leave The Drift forever.

  “Do you have any more gasoline?” he said.

  “Gasoline? Have all sorts of gasoline.”

  “Could you give me some?” Peter was not sure what he was about to say, but he could feel the urgency of the words forming in his mind. “I’ve got to get off The Drift,” he said. “I have a boat and a motor and a sail, but I need more gasoline to get back into The North Equatorial Current.”

  “How do they feel about your leaving?”

  “Everyone was upset at first. But now they think I’m going to stay because of the girl.”

  The old man laughed and waved his hands in the air. “Marvelous,” he said. “They’ll never forgive you. They’ll eat their hearts out.”

  “But can you let me have some gasoline?”

  “There’s sixty gallons over in the corner.” He pointed to a dark part of the room where the water sloshed against some metal jerrycans. “If that’s not enough, you can have some from upstairs. You see, I still get out at night once in a while to steal things. At one time or another I’ve stolen most everything that’s of any value on The Drift.”

  Peter went to the corner of the room and found three twenty-gallon containers. “One of these would be fine. I think it’s all I’ll need.”

  “Well I must say you’re not very greedy,” said The Hatchmaker. “Greed has always been one of my failings.” He laughed his terrible laugh. “And all my failings have had time to develop like fugues here on this miserable graveyard. You see I’m just like everyone else here in one way. I’ve wasted away too.”

  He raised his hands to still the objection that Peter never made. “Yes I have,” he said. “Just like the others. Even the music is wasted away. All the salt air and all those cracks in the sounding board. Do you have a wrench?”

  “A wrench?”

  “Something to tune the piano with. You’d think that on the whole of The Drift there’d be at least one wrench. It would sound a little better if only I had a wrench.”