Cabal Quotes

‘You can’t go leaving mesmerised women littering up the place,’ he snapped. ‘It’s, I don’t know, unhygienic.’

Cabal looked at him as if realising his brother was actually a complete nincompoop. ‘No,’ he said. ‘This was long before I even knew there was a son. The father tried to kill me.’ ‘Before he killed himself?’ ‘After he killed himself. Really, Horst, this isn’t complicated.’

“‘Satan was nothing.’ Cabal muttered to himself. 'I spat in his eye.’ There was a short pause. 'Figuratively. I figuratively spat in his eye. I couldn’t really spit in his eye.’ Another pause. 'He was too tall.’”

“There had been no possibility that he had survived. His body had not tumbled into a foaming sea or into a clouded abyss from which he might later make an unexpected return through the good offices of kindly dolphins or giant eagles. Cabal had himself checked that all life was extinguished by searching for a pulse, looking for clouding on a mirror held to the corpse’s mouth, and by kicking repeatedly.”

“‘Are you deliberately collecting animated heads, Johannes?’ he asked. Cabal frowned, then accepted the point. 'Not deliberately. It just happens.’”

‘You’ve had your warning, Cabal. Now, prepare to face the terrible arcane wrath of Maleficarus!’ Somewhere, a sheep bleated and quite ruined the effect.

‘Why on Earth did you steal three dead popes?’ asked Cabal. ‘First, to make the Vatican very cross. That was funny. Second reason, delicious.’

“‘It’s a philosophical minefield!’ Cabal had a brief mental image of Aristotle walking halfway across an open field before unexpectedly disappearing in a fireball. Descartes and Nietzsche looked on appalled. He pulled himself together.”

“Instead he gave Cabal his most professional pat on the shoulder. It was his best pat, the one that said, You have my most sincere albeit non-specific sympathies. It was all he could do.”

“It was a nice coffin, well finished and very comfortable, and he would hate to see its corners dashed and its surfaces scratched by a short career in stair tobogganing.”

There was a short embarrassed pause in which Cabal wondered why they wouldn’t go away, and the couple desperately tried to formulate a polite plan for getting away.

“He staggered a little, unsure whether he should drop to one knee because he’d been shot or because it was the dramatically correct thing to do. He did so anyway, to give himself something to do while he thought about it.”

“‘You don’t look well, if you don’t mind me saying so.’ 'Yes. Yes, I do,’ said Cabal, drawing on some inner reservoir of animosity. 'I’m always pale. I’m…’ Inspiration danced lithely out of grasp. 'A pale person.’”