“She felt oddly complimented. Petrov hadn't thought she's just a girl; he'd thought she might be a desperate criminal.”

“This is Hell," he tried to explain for the third time. "Not a drop-in centre. You can't just turn up and say, 'Oh, I was just in the neighbourhood and thought I'd call by and have a bit of a chinwag with Lord Satan.' It simply isn't done.""No," said the infuriating mortal. "It hasn't been done. There is a difference. May I pass now?""No, you may not. Satan's a very busy . . . um, is very busy right now. He can't go interrupting his work for every Tom, Dick, and Johannes"--he paused for effect, but the human just looked at him with a faint air of what seemed to be pity--"Harry, that is, who turns up demanding audience.""Really?" said Cabal. "I had no idea. I thought this would be an uncommon occurrence, unique even, but you seem to imply that it happens all the time. Fair enough.”

“Now you're an adult, Katya!" he'd said, picking her up under the armpits like he'd been doing since she'd been born.”

“Cabal regarded her with mild amusement. “Smile when you whisper,” he advised her. “You’re supposed to be flirting with me, if you recall?” She stared at him icily. Then suddenly her expression thawed and she smiled winsomely, her eyes dewy with romantic love. “Oh, sweetheart… somebody tried to kill you? Whosoever would do such a thing to my nimpty-bimpty snookums?”Cabal could not have been more horrified if she’d pulled off her face to reveal a gaping chasm of eternal night from which glistening tentacles coiled and groped. That had already happened to him once in his life, and he wasn’t keen to repeat the experience. “What?” he managed in a dry whisper.“Smile when you whisper,” she said, her expression fixed and blood-curdlingly coquettish. You’re supposed to be flirting with me, remember?” “Please don’t do that.”

“You know, I don't believe they noticed I had murdered them. I really don't. They just seemed faintly put out, as if it were a bit of bad luck, an act of God. 'Oh, my carotid artery has been severed with an open razor. I knew I should have cut down on greasy foods.' 'Botheration, I'm being belaboured with a fourteenth-century battleaxe. What are the odds, eh?”

“Rufus Maleficarus has sorely disappointed me personally. I thought he was making quite a good recovery from what the previous director had unhelpfully referred to as "a soul-searing, sanity-dissolving, profoundly malevolent appetite for power and revenge." As it happens, I think the finger-painting lessons were going very well, at least up until Rufus used the paint to create a summoning circle, and then rode out of here on the back of an obliging Hound of Tindalos...”

“As the barman’s hand rose from beneath the bar, Cabal was filled with a presentiment and a strange foreboding that he hadn’t felt since the last time he’d watched the nightmare corpse city of R’lyeh rise, effulgent with the ineffable and fetid with fish, rise from the depths of the Pacific.”