TH02 - The Priest of Evil (2 page)

Mikko lay still, he was afraid. For it didn’t stop there, it never stopped there, because Father became all the more angry when he couldn’t find the pistol and shoot them all. He lay perfectly still, so still that it almost felt as though he didn’t exist, as though he were almost dead, and he was certain this would make Mother and Father very happy, because in some way everything was always his fault. Perhaps they had been arguing about the fact that he still hadn’t learned to get up in the night and use the potty. That was why they called him Mr Piss Pants.

Very cautiously he raised his head. Father was already rushing towards the window. In a flash his hand was on the latch; he turned it and pulled it open. The outside air flooded in; it was like water. Father was lying on the window ledge, but thankfully Marja was holding him by the belt. Mikko dashed over to help and somehow he managed to clamber on to Father’s back and pull him inside – or so it seemed, at least. A red neon sign flashed on the building opposite, but he couldn’t make out all of its letters yet.

‘Erkki!’ came Mother’s voice. ‘Erkki, please!’

At that everything stopped again, just as it had in the kitchen, as if by magic. The radiators seemed to have stopped rattling. No one said a word. No one looked at anyone else. Only Saara cried in the bedroom, wailing at the top of her lungs. Mikko could see her in the mirror standing up in her cot, white as a rabbit, holding on to the bars with both hands. There came a rustling sound as Father dug in his pocket for a cigarette. Mother snapped: ‘Look what you’ve done, you little brats! You’ve woken up your sister. You should both be ashamed! Who gave you permission to get out of bed? Marja, go and get your sister back to sleep. Mikko: toilet, then straight back to bed like you’d never got up.’

Mikko plodded back to Rum-Rum. He was lying on the hall floor, broken. He didn’t have the strength to say his evening prayers, he was so tired, but he hoped that God would forgive him this once.

Sinikka didn’t yet know she was Sinikka. Nobody else knew either, because she was still invisible, hidden away deep inside the darkness.
But this wasn’t a malevolent darkness like the darkness underground; it was warm and good, it gave her strength and life, gradually preparing her for what was to come. No one could have known what the future held in store. Only one person knew, and even He didn’t breathe a word about it.

But if there had been light – and if someone had been there watching – they would have seen straight away how wonderful Sinikka was. She had everything: a delicately rounded head and the tip of a little nose, like porcelain; eyes still closed but unbelievably big, and tiny wrinkled ears like ferns unravelling. And of course she had arms and legs and fingers and toes too, the kind that only fairies have, though she didn’t have any wings.

Sinikka could already taste sweet things. And she could hear too, though she didn’t yet know that the strange murmuring sound was speech, words that people exchange with one another.

And of course Sinikka had a mind too, though nobody could see it any more than they could see Sinikka; nobody would ever see it. Nonetheless, it must surely have been very much like Sinikka herself: delicate and fragile, almost transparent – you might even be able to see red and blue veins running through it like a network of roads and rivers. Above all what her mind needed was for someone to take care of Sinikka, feed her, touch her softly and hold her tenderly in their arms. To love her.

If someone were to claim that right in the middle of Helsinki there stood a bare mountain, and that you could walk straight through it without possessing the slightest supernatural powers – not to mention the fact that that mountain’s name was The Brocken and that inside the mountain there lived an earth spirit – he would undoubtedly be considered rather odd.

But without due cause, however, for this was almost true. No one knew about it, or rather, no one knew it to be a mountain, despite – like tens of thousands of commuters – seeing it every day, morning and night.

Perhaps the name ‘mountain’ was a bit too flattering, though a mountain was what it most resembled. Its sides were particularly
mountain-like: steep, almost sheer, uneven and rocky. Dotted about the rock face were the marks left by drilling and quarrying. The mountain’s height varied between fifteen and twenty metres depending on the precise spot; it was almost three hundred metres long and about a hundred or so metres wide. It narrowed to a point at both ends, making the whole structure resemble a diamond-shaped boiled sweet.

On a map of the city it could be found on page fifty-two, in square DJ/78. Yet on the map it was only a patch of green grass, barely the size of a fingernail. Neither had it been given a name, but then again surveyors and cartographers did not know it existed either.

The page in question showed Pasila. And Pasila was indeed where the mountain was to be found, between East and West Pasila, perhaps slightly more to the east, where the two central train lines finally divided. There it rose majestically, a lone rock castle, surrounded by trains speeding in all directions, a place nobody ever had recourse to visit.

The claim that you could walk right through the mountain was also true. From behind the Hartwall Arena ran a bridge that, after it had crossed the tracks, began to slope downwards until it eventually formed a tunnel through the mountain. This tunnel came out at Ratapihantie right in front of the city exhibition centre.

If someone were to reach the top of the mountain, they would notice that the view was much the same as from the islands in the archipelago: rolling rock faces and promontories, muddy hollows sprouting with yellowed hay and moss, brittle birches, alders and ancient, resilient dwarf spruces.

At the southern face of the mountain there was evidence that the site had once been very significant indeed. A trench about twenty metres long, now partly filled with soil, had been hewn into the side of the rock. At one end the trench led to a concrete bunker inside the quarry – perhaps this had been planned as a bomb shelter for a handful of people – while the other end of the trench wound its way round beneath a concrete platform propped up on pillars several metres high. A set of concrete steps led up to the platform and if you climbed them you could see that a rail of piping ran round the edge of the slab, with rusted mounting bolts set into the floor forming two circles next to one another. One could only guess at
what this had once been – something to do with anti-aircraft defence during the war; perhaps a spotlight or two.

Almost halfway up the mountain, hidden among the thicket, was a more recently erected shack made of corrugated iron, like a flat-roofed cabin with no windows and no door. At first you could not really tell what the purpose of this was either. But if you peered inside through the eaves you could see that the surface of the walls had been replaced with heavy steel mesh, and if you listened carefully, you could make out a faint, distant murmur, as if the mountain itself were breathing. This construction must have had something to do with the bunker underneath the mountain; if you were able to gain access to the railway yard and have a look around, you would soon notice two hefty steel doors at the foot of the mountain.

Standing at this corrugated iron shack, you would finally realise that, despite everything, there were visitors to the mountain every now and then: its walls were so covered in graffiti that not even by scratching it could you reveal its original colour. And if you were to examine the area more closely you would just be able to make out a path winding away from the shack down towards the northern end of the mountain. At that point the rock face was at its lowest and the incline at its gentlest, the easiest place to climb up. Still, in order to get there these daring graffiti artists would have had to negotiate their way across the central train line, moving dangerously close to the power cables at the transformer station, and climb over sturdy mesh fences.

The ground was covered in junk, the same rubbish that was to be found in the forests around any city: broken glass, empty spray paint cans, pieces of cardboard and plywood. Somehow even a child’s red slipper had ended up here. However, this rubbish did not seem particularly fresh: it was faded and rusted, having doubtless lain there as the snows of many a winter had fallen and melted.

There was a strange atmosphere on the mountain. So that no matter how badly you had wanted to go there, and even if you’d managed to arrive in one piece, you’d just want to turn around and leave. Fast.

And if you happened to look closely at the mountain from the platforms at Pasila station, as night began to engulf the blue dusk and the
streetlights came on, with a bit of luck you might have been able to make out some faint movement. Just like now: it seemed as though someone had climbed up the steps and was now standing on the concrete platform above, motionless.

Killing a person was not difficult, no more difficult than killing a pigeon. All it required was a soft push – at the right time, of course, and in the right place. He of all people could sense when the time came, or rather in a mysterious way the time and place were revealed to him, and that was it: flesh was torn from the bones, guts smattered across the gravel floor, vertebrae and joints were cast about like beans, and the soul departed from the degenerate body that turns people into a devil of greed. Of course, he knew this well. He had seen it, and his nostrils had been filled with the shuddering, salty smell of raw human flesh.

Particularly beautiful was the moment when the soul was liberated from the body; it spurted up into the air in a shower of little particles, no larger than salt crystals, and for a fleeting moment they came together to form a magnificent vermilion swirl, only to be consumed a moment later by the rock, the divine body of Maammo herself. This is what is meant at funerals with the words ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ – and with that the coming of the Truth had drawn one step closer!

‘
Ea lesum cum sabateum!
’ he proclaimed and fidgeted restlessly, but checked himself almost immediately, quickly made the three holy marks of Maammo and lowered his head; for this he had to do in front of Maammo, even though he was her chosen one – the earth spirit – a force from beneath the ground; a force greater than that of any human being; a hybrid of angel and priest. He was the daughter of Maammo – or the son – depending on which form Maammo herself had chosen.

‘
Vibera berus, quelle villaaum est
,’ he added, his voice strangely tight, as though he had not used it for a long time and it had rusted fast in his throat. He gave off a strange smell; it was not quite stale, but like the smell of stone that blew against the faces of people going down into the underground. He
placed his hands next to one another on the railing and caressed its rough surface, corroded by decades of rain. Then he raised his eyes.

And the look in his eyes was such that if anyone had met his gaze at that same moment, their legs would have given way beneath them.

His city was right there, on its knees before him, not a dark spot in sight. In the back of his head he could hear the gentle rush of power, silver sand shaking within its golden rattle, and the power he held in his hands was so strong that he could feel them warming. Again he had to control himself, for this was not entirely of his doing – it was an expression of the infinite grace Maammo had bestowed upon him – and he contented himself with looking out over all that was his.

In front of him lay Pasila, Alppila and Laakso, and beyond that the city centre: Kluuvi, Punavuori, Eira. To his left, humbly biding its time, was Eastern Helsinki, Herttoniemi, Myllypuro, Vuosaari – how well he knew his kingdom – whilst Ruskeasuo, Munkkivuori and Meilahti sprawled out on his right. Behind him were more districts than anywhere else, but he had not turned his back on them. Their thousands upon thousands of lights shone like a sea of blue and orange. No, he had not forsaken them, for his task was to redeem them; this Maammo herself had decreed.

Killing was not a sin. Neither could it then be considered a crime; this is nothing but the falsehood of those who do not understand. The fifth commandment was a perfect example. Three letters had been added to its original form: N, O and T, thus turning its meaning around. The same applied to God and the Devil, both utterly foolish creations, one supposedly good and the other evil. What nonsense! There was only one true and holy god, and it was Maammo, Maammo the Merciful, and her three incarnations: the Holy Big Bang, the Holy Sun and the Holy Iron Heart, which was geographically the closest of all, for there it lay right beneath his feet. There it glowed, a mighty molten mass at the heart of the earth, waiting to explode and to be conjoined with the Holy Sun and the Holy Big Bang – this was the Truth. A new Big Bang would one day inevitably come, but it could not come so long as the world was filled with evil and filth, and it was to this end that Maammo required sacrifices, and blessed with her grace the pious beings who brought them to her.

He closed his eyes and took a deep, devout breath. The air tasted of the city and the spring evening. It smelt of his apostles: of movement, of inexorable forward motion, of hot metal and electricity, the blue milk of Maammo. The apostles drank it through their snouts directly from the cables in the air. He crouched down to take a closer look: even now there were five of them on the move. One of them rattled past at the foot of The Brocken, and now that it was dark and the lights were switched on he could even make out the people inside. A man fiddling with his mobile phone; a boy guzzling a hamburger; a woman reading a newspaper. Each of them believed they were simply sitting on a train, travelling home, on their way to work or to visit someone. None of them had the faintest idea that they were riding upon his apostle, or that they were the subjects of a fervent conversion process. For the apostles were constantly at work; they shaped those ignorant people’s minds with a fine radiation, so fine in fact that people were only rarely aware of its presence, and even then it manifested itself as a sort of drowsiness, forcing people to yawn or take a little nap. He smiled with joy, and eventually he gave a hoarse chuckle: his work was advancing even while he was at rest.