TH02 - The Priest of Evil (27 page)

Piipponen stumbled forwards and began running down the stairs as quickly as if he had wheels on his feet. The blue railing creaked beneath his hand and he could feel his palms burning. Once he reached the landing between the second and third floors he was overcome by the nauseating facts: the man was gone. In a daze he tried to catch his breath and looked around.

However, he only stood still for a few seconds. He quickly shrugged off his jacket, tied the rough sleeve around his neck and began yanking it back and forth like a sponge. His skin instantly started to burn, and as he continued rubbing it turned a bright red colour. Blood had risen to the surface, he could feel it. He then slipped his jacket back on, tore his shirt open – a button flew on to the stairs and he picked it up. He knew precisely where it should be found: in the corridor on the floor next to his office door. Finally he took his mobile phone out of its case, and without a moment’s hesitation slammed it at the corner of his eye with full force. It broke on impact: the phone’s battery fell out and a crack appeared on its screen, while a warm stream of blood trickled from the corner of his eye. Before long it reached halfway down his chin.

‘Help!’ he shouted, his voice booming through the stairwell. ‘I’ve been attacked! The suspect’s escaped! Immediate assistance required!’

‘
Belaboris botulium diaboli vascenata
,’ he said to dispel the uncertainty from his mind. This was more than uncertainty, for a moment it had been pure fear; denying it was pointless. He had not experienced such a thing for years, as Maammo had always given him strength. But now for some reason Maammo was testing him. In some respects she was still on his side – the events of the previous night had been an indication of that. As an opponent Maammo had chosen such a stupid infidel that he had managed to slip
away easily. He had not liked the man in the slightest: he stank of greed and pride, of money stashed in an old sock.

The backpack was very heavy, he could feel it pulling at his back. Would the boy have the strength to carry it?

The worst of it was that now they had begun their religious persecution, for that and nothing else was what the previous evening had been about. They could not accept that he worshipped Maammo, the only true deity, and that his faith demanded that he carry out necessary sacrifices. It would have been that same bigotry had he broken into their churches, kicked over the font and trampled their consecrated wafers into the ground.

In fact, this was not merely religious persecution, this was a holy war – and they had declared it. They had declared it by making it impossible for him to visit his sacred shrines: the Railway Station, the underground stations and the trains themselves - the holy Orange Apostles. After that policeman had told him that there were cameras everywhere he had checked – and it was true. And not only at the stations, but almost everywhere, on the streets, outside every shop and government office. This meant that at any given moment he was on camera for all the nosy heathens to see. For this reason he was now pacing around the streets behind the Railway Station and wandering through Kaisaniemi Park. Although he had taken precautions to avoid being followed, he was still in the form of a man. After all, on their cameras they had already seen him in the form of a woman. This time, however, he was wearing a long raincoat and a cap with an extended brim. When he lowered his head the brim all but covered his face from view; in addition to this, he had left his hair half open so that it flowed down his back and was only tied at the end with a rubber band.

Another reason he had been unable to assume the form of a woman was that the boy had to be able to recognise him. That was, of course, if he turned up. It was late in the afternoon and school would certainly have finished for the day. Throughout the day – and the previous night for that matter – he had been sending the boy powerful messages to come and meet him, for now that war had been declared it was time to carry out the
final strike - especially now that the future of the New Big Bang might be in danger, and would be fatefully delayed if they managed to catch him. As an extra precaution he had left his glasses at home; they were very distinctive and he could see well enough without them.

Still, all these factors – the war situation, continuously having to watch his back, living in an unnatural way – considerably weakened his concentration and perhaps even his powers, and he was not at all sure whether his messages had found their way inside the boy’s head. In addition to all this, his left hand ached constantly, distracting him and making it difficult for him to scale the ladder down into his home. He had been unable to stop the bleeding and had resorted to putting a leather glove over his hand. Now that the blood had dried the glove was stuck to his hand so tightly that he had not dared to take it off.

His hand had also been a hindrance in making his final preparations and in putting the bomb together. It had impaired him so much that he had had to start again many times and adjust the various settings, but there it finally was in the rucksack on his back. The clock was not yet ticking, but it would start the moment he pressed the battery into place, and after that only an hour would be left until the final BOOM! He could only imagine how the nails and bolts and pieces of metal would be cast in a great cloud in all directions, and how they would tear the infidels to pieces; their blood, their flesh and their splintered bones whirling in a wild, red storm.

He had already decided upon the place of the sacrifice. It was appropriate in many ways, a temple of material greed, awash with people, and what’s more its structure was open, a grand hall, allowing the force of the blast to move freely upwards, right up to the top floor. There was even a glass ceiling and he was certain that it would collapse, shattering into millions of razor-sharp shards that would shower down upon the heads of the infidels who had been spared from the initial blast.

‘Ea lesum!
’ he uttered, for something told him that the boy might be on his way after all. He did not know how he knew this; perhaps it was the pigeon that hopped out of his way on the path through the park, its head jutting back and forth. His mind was made up: he would start the clock. Let it be a test: it would force the boy to come to him. And if the
boy did not come, he would once again demonstrate his bravery and his devotion to Maammo by stopping the clock only half a minute before detonation.

He stopped by a park bench, removed the bag from his back, placed it on the bench beside him and, somewhat hindered by his hand, began untying the cords. And although those stalking him thought that by fortifying the underground with cameras they could prevent him from reaching Maammo’s sacred temples and his home, they were mistaken. In the centre of town he could make his way underground at five different points, through unmarked, almost invisible grey doors in the foundations of buildings; although in fact he had only managed to deactivate the alarms on two of them, using aluminium foil so that they appeared to be shut even as he slipped in and out of them. The only true hindrance was that he now had to walk much farther. He finally managed to open the rucksack and picked up the clock. He had replaced the glass at the front so that the hands would not accidentally snag on anything inside. He placed his thumb upon the battery and pressed. First came a click, then the regular tick as the clock was set in motion.

‘
Cum sabateum!
’ he murmured, like a blessing. ‘Come my boy, come to me!’

‘I’m only now beginning to realise quite how terrible it would have been,’ said Matti, and now he meant it, for at first he hadn’t fully understood the seriousness of the matter. ‘I would have been stuck with Mum and Roo, and they would probably have sent me to a foster home.’

‘How’s he doing?’ Leena asked, but avoided his gaze. She was behaving oddly, as if she were nervous or felt guilty about something. They were sitting on the underground train rattling its way towards the centre of town, and this time they had even bought tickets – Matti had insisted.

‘He’s OK, I suppose. He knocked his knee quite badly.’

‘I meant how’s he dealing with it?’

‘He’s good at hiding things, but he didn’t seem in shock or anything.’

‘Terrible that someone would do something like that,’ said Leena, staring ahead strangely as though she couldn’t see a thing.

‘It was only last week someone got themselves killed at Hakaniemi.’

‘What made you decide to go and see him now?’ she asked, quickly changing the subject. ‘The priest, I mean?’

‘It’s just a strange feeling, I feel like I need to see him. I suppose I ought to thank him for healing me. Somehow… I thought he might be able to take care of Dad.’

‘I’m sorry… Maybe he isn’t a priest after all. And I don’t know whether he’s all that good either.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just a hunch,’ she said and turned to look out of the window. She started chewing the nail on her little finger, and for a long moment neither of them said a word.

‘Haven’t you figured out the whole SIM-card thing yet?’ Leena asked finally, though she still didn’t seem like her old self.

‘What about it? She said she thought it was a CD.’

‘Oh come on, Matti, don’t be so gullible. She sells the exact same cards at work. She knew what it was all right. She was probably going to sell it off at half-price to some customer, and pocket the money herself.’

‘Really,’ Matti replied slowly. At first he was ashamed that his mother could be so conniving. Gradually he began to feel happier than ever that his father hadn’t been killed in the underground accident.

At the same moment he realised how painful it was waiting to move in with his father, and how he wished it would happen soon – that same day even. Only then did he remember the terrible fact that there had never been any discussion of him moving whatsoever. He had made it all up, and he had lied to Leena so much that for some reason he too was now beginning to believe it was all true. He let out a long, deep sigh and wondered whether to own up to everything once and for all.

‘Leena, listen,’ he said and took her hand, but his lips suddenly began to tremble and he couldn’t bring himself to tell her.

‘What?’

‘Just that I’m really glad Dad didn’t die.’

‘Who wouldn’t be? But will you promise me something? When we meet him – the priest.’

‘What about it?’

‘If you could make yourself scarce for a minute; I’ve got something personal I need to give him.’

‘What?’

‘I can’t tell you. There’s just something I want to ask him.’

‘OK.’

They fell silent again, each focussing on their own secrets. The train pulled into Hakaniemi. It was rush hour and people were flooding out into the shopping centres, heading back to their homes.

‘You realise…?’ said Leena. They were still holding each other by the hand, but now Matti no longer found it embarrassing. ‘We haven’t checked any of the other stations in case he’s there.’

‘Of course not, because he’ll be at the Railway Station.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I can feel it. Or he might be somewhere outside the station.’

‘Does it feel like he’s calling you? You know, like by some weird telepathy or in some spiritual way?’

‘Well, now that you ask… It’s just, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about him all day.’

‘That’s it, that’s exactly what happened to me.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. OK, let’s do a test – just for fun. Shut your eyes and concentrate really hard. Now guess exactly where we’re going to find him.’

Matti closed his eyes. He couldn’t feel anything out of the ordinary; nothing happened that might have meant someone was sending him thoughts. On the spur of the moment, just to please Leena, he said: ‘He’s outside on the square by the Railway Station, down there where the buses leave.’

‘Are you sure? You didn’t just make that up?’

‘No, not at all.’

‘Well, good. It’s just that I’ve never seen him anywhere other than the Railway Station or in the underground.’

‘We’ll soon see, we’ve just gone past Kaisaniemi.’

They ascended the slowly jolting escalator at the Railway Station in perfect silence, a silence held tight by something almost magical. They didn’t dare look at one another, though as if by accident their fingers gently touched each other on the black moving handrail. They both looked around, and Matti expected to see the priest at any moment. The decision to meet the priest seemed suddenly wrong, as though if he were caught a terrible punishment would ensue.

‘Leena,’ he whispered as they arrived at the level with the compass. ‘I’m not sure I want to see him after all.’

‘You’re not?’ said Leena, stopping in her tracks. They were standing in people’s way, right in the middle of the crowds coming up from the train, passengers barging into them on all sides, forcing them to move upwards with the mass.

‘I don’t know either,’ she whispered finally. ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this, like an omen…’

‘Maybe we should just go back?’

Leena bit her lip for a moment; they could already here the station announcements echoing through the vast hall.

‘No,’ she said after a moment’s thought. ‘Let’s go and see if he’s there; if you guessed right. Then we can just go home, we don’t need to go and talk to him.’

‘OK, but we will leave, won’t we? I can feel something in my stomach…’

They walked through the underground hall, weaving their way in between the groups of people, loitering first beside the numerous kiosks, then the toilets. The main door was only some twenty metres away, and a gust of wind caught them as people walked in and out. They stepped outside and stood beneath the massive stone pillars, staring out across the street and down to where the buses departed. There were dozens of people, hundreds maybe, making it impossible to distinguish anyone in the crowd.

‘I was wrong. He’s not here. Let’s go.’

‘Wait a minute. Do you see that man down by the taxi rank?’

‘Good afternoon, children,’ came a voice from behind them, and they both recognised it instantly, though it wasn’t as tense as normal – it was almost gentle. They spun around: the priest was standing behind them. This time he looked somehow different; instead of his normal jacket he was wearing a raincoat that reached almost down to his knees, and a baseball cap pulled so far down that it hid his face almost entirely.