TH02 - The Priest of Evil by Matti Joensuu Read Free Book Online Page A

quickly run from it, this time he decided to listen for a moment. It was still the same anxious feeling that made his shoulders tremble, that made him feel like weeping. He sighed heavily and let it pass, grabbed hold of his papers and began once again to read from the beginning.
    But he was too exhausted. All at once he felt the fatigue of a sleepless night and years of futile attempts at writing. He gave in, cast his papers on to the table and sat there staring at them, his head bowed.
    That night not only had his stomach been tense – he had spent the early hours running to the toilet every fifteen minutes – but his hands had been restless too. His fingers had left sticky dents on the sheets of paper. If paper were snow, someone might have thought a stubby-legged creature had plodded across it. He wondered what it might have looked like and decided that it must have been like floor dust rolled up into a ball. Suddenly he could almost see it: it had a wicker tail covered in thin hairs and a pair of deep red eyes as round as pearls. In the middle of all this he remembered the slipper - and the red-eyed creature died in a flash.
    It was made of brown checked material and had fallen off Father’s foot. There was a hole in his sock, right at the heel, though it didn’t look like a hole at all, but rather like an object. It looked like he’d stood on a ping-pong ball, which had become stuck there forever, never to bounce again. Its only function was to remain there and be crushed little by little into nothingness, under Father’s immense weight.
    ‘Damn it,’ he hissed and stood bolt upright. He was covered in sweat, droplets fell out of nowhere on to the lenses of his glasses, and he glanced furtively through the morning darkness surrounding him, scanning the corners and turning to look at the floor behind him. Eventually he noticed the soothing colours of the familiar painting on the wall. He was home. Safe.
    Or rather, he was in the place he called home: a tiny bedsit in the middle of town, amongst unfamiliar people, almost directly opposite Kallio church; so close in fact that its bells plagued him. The walls in this room had seen other peoples’ lives, but not his; the ceiling didn’t know how to protect him while he was thinking, creating new worlds back when everything was still fine; the floor didn’t know his feet, couldn’t steer him on to the right path, a path that would bring him life: people, people’s deeds, the mindless chaos that one day becomes a novel.
    Besides living in a false home, he was somewhere else too, a place he despised. He despised that state of mind. Six years on the trot, and on the door to this state of mind hung a sign bearing the word HELL.
    In his profession he ought to have been able to describe it well, but he could not. If he could have painted it, he would have depicted how a person can fall by the wayside, being sucked further and further down, engulfed in an abyss of murky water; how moss covers even the tiniest glimmer of light and water floods into the chest. How you hope against hope that a hand will reach out from somewhere. But no hand ever appears – nothing but eyeless fish swimming around you, their round white mouths shouting: ‘Shame on you! You are guilty and should be ashamed!’
    ‘Dad?’
    ‘What?’ he gave a start, as if he had been caught in the act, up to no good, and immediately he could feel the anxiety draining into his hands, and they began to quiver as though he were ill.
    ‘Is… is everything all right, Dad?’
    ‘Yes. Why do you ask?’
    ‘You were puffing and blowing again,’ said Sanna, her voice thick with sleep. ‘And swearing.’
    ‘I’m sorry. Did I wake you?’
    ‘I have to get up now anyway. Have you been up all night?’
    ‘No, only since three o’clock.’
    ‘And you’re sure everything’s OK?’
    ‘Yes, I’m sure. I was just thinking through a really exciting chapter. With a very nasty man.’
    He stood up and walked