Anton‘s Bark - Eight

Otto’s reading of Chapter Six features his surprise meeting with Father Promentano at the Spitzenhof café. He’d been expecting to meet Marie there. He’d had a clear premonition of that meeting. As a result, the fictional Otto can only react angrily when this doesn’t happen. We discover that the fictional Otto finds himself in conversations with the peculiar priest, a Greek god in disguise called Father Promentano, who delivers a carrot, followed by a stick. The carrot is a large sum of money, the stick is a nightmare. And so, while sitting with a deity in the Spitzenhof café, having refused divine money, the fictional Otto is plummeted to a place in his memory in 1999, when he was last with Marie before they separated, and he went to England. They were on holiday together. At one point during this holiday, the fictional Otto sees his future come alive, through a series of curious prophecies. The sixths chapter is followed by the real Otto’s brief commentary on a few sentences that will occur in Chapter Seven, as well as his account of Anton’s evermore desperate attempts to get back into the cave, in the year 1882.