TH02 - The Priest of Evil (3 page)

‘Maammo, Merciful One, Beloved One,’ he whispered and looked upwards. There were stars in the sky, envoys of the Holy Big Bang, and as he stood there staring at them he could feel the powerful presence of the Spirit; it was as though he had a fever, though only in his palms, his fingers and earlobes. Generally this meant only one thing: Maammo was calling to him, perhaps intimating that she would appear to him that night. How ardently he wished for this, for it was magnificent. It was the greatest thing life could offer. In its sheer glory it would be too much for ordinary humans, too wild and mind-boggling, and for this reason Maammo revealed herself only to her chosen ones, to her beloved earth spirits.

He had a feeling that, if Maammo were indeed to appear that evening, it would happen in the Apostolic Tunnel at the point where it intersected with the underground tunnel near the Central Railway Station. There he would be able to follow how the holiest of all, the Great Orange Apostles, went about their conversion; below ground for the most part, close to Maammo’s heart, just like he was. He turned and, in the almost pitch dark,
steadily walked down the steps from the concrete platform. He was no longer young, he had reached middle-age, or rather there was something dry and pallid about him, like an elderly person, and he did not have a particularly big build; he was short and rakish.

From the bag on his belt he slipped a key-ring into the palm of his hand, pressed it, and a thin beam of light shone out between his fingers. It was plenty for him, though deep in the underground caves he would often use a faint headlamp too, for in Maammo’s temples the darkness was exceptionally dense. A larger lamp, a floodlight, would have been troublesome; it could have betrayed him to the heathens, though at night he very rarely encountered them down in the tunnels.

‘At Hakaniemi?’ he asked amidst everything, for the thought had suddenly entered his mind – Hakaniemi – and the thought would not have occurred to him unless Maammo had wished to steer him in that direction. But there came no reply. Not yet, at least, and he began to wonder whether this time Maammo would appear as a man or a woman, as this would determine which sex he himself was to assume. He arrived at a ledge on the eastern face of The Brocken and came to a stop at a curious looking contraption made of chicken wire.

It resembled a great umbrella, its shaft wedged into a hole in the rock and projecting up through the shade, stretching several metres into the air. However, if someone had examined the contraption closer, they would soon have understood its purpose: the umbrella-like section could be raised up and down along the shaft. There was a hole in the shaft and on the ground, attached to the end of a long rope, there lay a metal peg, just large enough to fit into the hole. All he needed was a handful of seeds, then he could lie in wait for the pigeons to arrive. One small tug of the rope and that was it.

‘
Tipa tipa
,’ he called softly, and now his voice was not rough in the slightest, but gentle and calming. ‘
Tipa tipa.
My little pigeon…’

He noticed that he secretly wished Maammo would appear as a woman. This would be more impressive than if she stepped from the wall as a man. Immediately he felt ashamed, for Maammo could read everyone’s thoughts, and who was he to place the incarnations of Maammo in an
order of merit? He would have to pray for forgiveness without delay: ‘
Maammon. Esculentae nutale sorbit ooli, aamen
.’

He knew instantly whenever Maammo was to appear as a woman, for then a blue-green shimmer came upon the rock, the kind of light given off by welding work at night; the light stretching from the floor of the tunnel right up to the ceiling. And then, without warning, the rock face would split open like a curtain of granite and Maammo would step forth. She was almost three metres tall, a fulsome, naked woman hewn from the rock, yet alive, and beneath her skin shone that same beautiful green light. It shone most intensely from her nipples, though even more powerfully from between her legs, her vulva half-open, gleaming, ready to receive the holy seed. And when Maammo took the form of a man his divine skin shone bright red and his glorious member stood tall and erect, ready to cast the holy seed out into the world. If he had so wished, he could have impregnated every woman on earth in a single night.

In front of both these incarnations of Maammo he would fall to his knees. Never did he look Maammo in the eyes – this was forbidden. The light radiating from her face was so bright that it would have burnt the eyes of any such sinner to dust. Not even the pagans dared look directly at the Holy Sun. As he crouched before Maammo his mind was filled first with a divine peace, then with joy, and he felt no worry or fear – such things simply vanished. All that remained was the state of bliss Maammo had imparted to him.

‘
Tipa tipa
,’ he uttered as he flashed the beam of light towards the centre of the chicken wire cage. And there it was: inside the cage was a single pigeon. He had set the others free straight away, but this – this one was not merely a grey weakling, it had flecks of white and brown, like chocolate; it was a web-footed pigeon, a breed that nested in the city centre and sometimes even in Kruununhaka. The blood of these pigeons was very good indeed, surpassed perhaps only by that of the golden-beaked pigeon.

‘My little pigeon,’ he sighed calmingly. The pigeon remained curled up for the night, only its eye blinked. He opened a hatch on the side of the cage and slipped in first his finger, then his wrist, and moved like an anaconda towards the pigeon. And there it was in his hand. It felt much smaller than it
looked, it was almost the size of a sparrow, and he could feel its little heart throbbing frantically like a motor:
prr!
He removed the pigeon from the cage and with his free hand he performed the marks of blessing above it, reinforcing them with the words: ‘
Alcueera cum pica lotus est
.’

He stood up, slipped the pigeon into the large compartment in his belt bag and closed the zip. At first it flapped around a little – they always did that – then it began to calm down and found a comfortable position. Generally they would remain like this right up until the sacrifice. He quickly performed all the holy marks in each direction, calming the city around him and, surprisingly nimbly and briskly for a man his age, began climbing back up towards the corrugated iron hut halfway up the mountain.

Graffiti amused him. Or rather, he was amused that three different groups of boys battled to see whose scrawls could claim possession of the hut. There were seven boys altogether and he allowed them to play at peace, though he could have shooed them away easily enough as the hut rightfully belonged to him. But he had played such a cunning trick on the boys that they could not imagine what lay in store for them. For, in fact, he had transferred each of their souls into a small white pebble, a large collection of which lay in a bag dangling from his belt. Sometimes when the mood took him he would take out one of the pebbles, lay it on the rock and crush it with a larger stone. And lo and behold: somewhere an unexplained accident would occur, a car would crash into a wall or mount the pavement for no apparent reason, and the person whose soul had been inside the pebble would die.

The hut was situated in the middle of a patch of dense thicket. He walked towards a spruce tree with a trunk the width of his thigh. On closer inspection it looked as though its branches had been pruned at random, but this too had been carefully considered. He took hold of the cut branches and began climbing as easily as if it were a ladder. Almost three metres up he was level with the roof of the hut; he needed only jump a short distance and he was on top of the construction.

There he listened for a moment. Traffic hummed through the city, playing out its own steady symphony. The tracks screeched at the bridge
across Pasila – probably a commuter train from Espoo, one of the Red Apostles, and a helicopter could be heard chattering somewhere in the east. None of these sounds was any cause for concern.

He crouched down, took hold of the handle of a hatch on the roof with both hands and yanked it. The hatch had been positioned very carefully indeed: from the ground it was impossible to know that it existed, the hut simply looked like a pile of corrugated iron. He opened the hatch fully, sat on the roof and began searching with his feet for the top rungs of the ladder. By this point, even an inexperienced person would have been able to guess that the journey down was long; that beneath there gaped chasms of empty space, tunnels and more tunnels, entire networks, perhaps as much as three hundred kilometres long.

Inside it smelt precisely the same as the earth spirit. And he could hear that same soft, eternal murmur.

Harjunpää held his mobile phone against his ear and wondered for a moment whether it was radiating anything dangerous or not. Perhaps it was one of the patterns in the wallpaper that got him thinking; the paintings had all been removed, leaving only the nails behind. He could hear the usual background noises on the phone: doorbells ringing; low, muffled speech, a voice explaining something over the squad radio. Inside the apartment all he could hear was the faint whistle of the freezing wind and the rasp of bugs dying a slow, poisoned death, like moths madly striking against a lamp. Then there was the tapping, like a distant drum, coming from the cupboard in the hall. He had the constant feeling that something was wrong, or that something terrible was about to happen. It was a niggling feeling, as if his shoes were a size too small and his heels covered in blisters about to burst.

He couldn’t pin down quite what had caused this unease; whether it was the body, which he had given only a cursory glance and hadn’t yet had a chance to examine thoroughly, or Jari, the man standing silently next to him in a dress. Was it something else entirely? Something at home?

‘Harjunpää, you still there?’

‘Where else do you think I’d be?’ he growled quietly.

‘I’ve double-checked and they’re all on their way, a doctor too. You know what the morning traffic’s like.’

‘OK, we’ll wait here.’

‘I’ll tell the squad to get a move on if you think it’ll help. I told the ambulance not to rush though, it’s not as if anyone’s life is at risk.’

‘All right, just sort it out. There’s no real emergency here, but I can’t do anything until someone else turns up.’

‘Got it.’

‘Thanks,’ he added and for a brief moment something approaching weariness flashed across his face, but his expression soon returned to normal: it bore the look of a man who was used to waiting, who had seen too much.

Harjunpää glanced at his watch: it was almost half past seven. He had already been at the scene for three quarters of an hour but still hadn’t been able to do anything except assess the situation and try to speak to Jari. He had no reason not to believe Jari’s story, but hadn’t dared leave him unattended for a second.

Out of the corner of his eye he took another look at Jari: his expression was still the same. It was like a knot, a painfully tangled knot. Harjunpää could sense that same pain in his eyes and his mouth, particularly now that Jari had bitten his lips together into a tight groove. He looked as though he thought he was drowning or that he was trying desperately to bite something in two. On top of this, patchy stubble covered his face, disconsolate like the plague.

Jari already looked like an old man, though he was only just over forty. He seemed to be constantly listening to a murmur deep within himself, his head tilted slightly to one side, shivering. He hadn’t wanted to put on the tracksuit Harjunpää had found in one of the wardrobes and was still standing there wearing only a thin summer dress and a pair of nylon tights wrinkled around his ankles. The doors were all wide open – they had to remain open, only now could they breathe without feeling nauseous. The breeze came in through the stairwell like something
living, tugging at the hem of Jari’s frock and making him tremble with cold, then gushed out of the balcony door, taking with it ton upon cubic ton of the nightmare inside.

Suddenly it dawned on Harjunpää and he gave a start – it was as if someone had whispered to him: it was the hall cupboard. That’s what was bothering him. He still hadn’t looked inside it, partly because Jari had become almost hysterical when Harjunpää had touched the handle. He thought back to what had happened to one of his colleagues last winter. A caretaker had alerted the police to a flat in Eira because of a smell in the corridor. The patrol had discovered an old woman, who seemed to have died of natural causes, and had taken care of everything like normal, with the routine of having done it hundreds of times before. Only when the undertaker Stenberg had gone into the bathroom to wash his hands did he discover the other body: the old woman’s husband sitting on the toilet with a pistol in his hand and a bullet in his forehead.

‘What’s in there, Jari?’ asked Harjunpää, his words booming as if they had been standing in a cave.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The cupboard.’

‘Daddy.’

‘You told me there was a dog in there. And you said that your daddy died when you were a little boy.’

‘I was ten. And he told me to take good care of Mummy, and now she…’

‘Your mummy’s dead, Jari. She was a very sick old lady and you took care of her as best you could.’

‘Is she dead?’ Jari seemed confused and for the first time he looked Harjunpää in the eyes. A restless muscle at the corner of his mouth began to quiver.

‘I’m afraid so. And we both went up to the door and had a look. Now put on that tracksuit or you’ll catch a chill. Some more people will be here soon.’

‘Who’s coming?’

‘A doctor, just like I told you. And some policemen who are going to take your dog to the vet’s until we get you back on your feet again.’

‘You can’t take the dog!’ Jari’s scream rebounded against the walls in the empty flat, its echo reverberating down the stairwell. His hands flew up to his forehead and his fingers looked like gnarled branches with which he was trying to hold his head together. ‘Daddy’ll be furious! If you open the door he’ll go straight for your throat!’