Free TH02 - The Priest of Evil by Matti Joensuu Page B

so firm after all – it was a platform fashioned from an iron grille and covered only half of the shaft. It would turn your stomach to look down between your feet into who knows what; if you should drop something small through the grille, there would be no reassuring clatter or splash to indicate that the object had arrived somewhere.
    Along the other side of the shaft the top of the next set of ladders could be dimly made out, leading down and down, and a faint upward draught would catch at your trouser legs, giving you goose bumps.
    At this platform, along both the northern and southern sides of the shaft, were two doors – or rather, two openings. To the left gaped an empty room, a couple of metres wide and about five metres long, with concrete facing along the walls. However, the room was not entirely empty, for along the floor jutted a number of rusted mounting bolts, rather like those on the cemented floor outside but considerably sturdier and with two rails attached to the floor running between them. Along the ceiling ran a massive pipe, several metres long, which had once led somewhere and had perhaps served a very important function.
    It was impossible to say with any certainty what had been in the room many years ago – a winch of some sort, a crane, or perhaps some kind of ventilation pump that had later been replaced by something further down, newer and more efficient. The opening to the right was covered from the inside with a green tarpaulin – the kind that you often see gently rustling in the wind, covering boats tethered up for the winter.
    Behind the tarpaulin was a room all but identical to the one opposite, but this room was far from empty: on the floor along its far wall lay a foammattress and upon that a sleeping bag left open to air. At the head of the mattress stood a wooden box, one that once had been used to transport apples. Upon the box there was a storm lantern and an alarm clock without its glass cover – even in the darkness you could feel the hands of the clock and see what time of night it was.
    Near the door opening a nylon rope had been stretched from wall to wall across the room and this clearly served as a clothes-line. On clothes hangers to the right hung women’s clothes, for the most part loose skirts and caftans reaching almost to the ankles, a few blazers and a floral woollen cardigan. To the left hung men’s clothing: different coloured trousers, a pair of jeans, jackets and shirts and a hefty leather jacket from the 1950s. All this clearly served another purpose too: if you drew the clothes together they formed a handy inner door to cut out the draught.
    Along the walls were a number of cardboard boxes, and in the two outermost boxes was presumably a selection of underwear: one box for women’s underwear, one for men’s. At least, on top of the left-hand box were various men’s hats and baseball caps, whilst upon the right-hand box sat two berets, one blue and one green, and with them a brimmed hat and a straw hat with a plastic flower stitched into the ribbon.
    In addition to this there was a folding chair – like the ones often found on terraces during the summer, the kind that are particularly uncomfortable to sit in – and opposite the chair a Trangia stove and an old burnt pan. Beside them stood a neat row of full water bottles, and behind them a row of empty ones.
    Books lay in piles on almost every free surface. If you were to take a closer look at these you would notice that the majority of them dealt with different religions and astronomy – and that every last one of them had been stolen from the city library.
    The only item that might have been considered a luxury or a decoration was a poster hanging on the wall above the bed. The poster showed an image from the furthest reaches of space, nebulae joining together to create another Big Bang, a new universe, or perhaps it was simply a far off galaxy – it was impossible for any layman to know precisely what it