Anton‘s Bark - Eleven

Despite the entanglement of its erstwhile writer, now trapped
deep in the cave, Otto in Flames has taken on a momentum of its
own. Today, the real Otto reads Chapter Nine for us. This chapter
follows the meeting he’d had with Marie at the Spitzenhof café.
Since 1999, the fictional Otto has known through his prophecies
more or less what would happen to him on his first day in Vienna.
Despite his bitterness at being nothing more than a character in
a series of Anton Matins novels, the ninth chapter of Anton’s
book sees Otto ensnared in an unforeseen predicament with Marie,
he can’t wriggle out of. They leave the Spitzenhof separately.
But Otto’s prophecy, such as it is, tells him that he will
certainly see her again, back in his hotel room, at midnight that
night. The only way the real Otto can influence events now, is by
narrating his version of Anton’s wild-goose chase for a shoe,
thrown by a lost French cartographer, down a cave passage in the
Unseen. The shoe leads the writer straight into a Greek myth,
which in itself will signal the structure for Chapter Ten.