The cat had been coming to the pub longer than any of the current regulars could account for, sitting on the same stool at the end of the bar like it had been carved into the wood specifically for that purpose, and it asked its first riddle to anyone who made the mistake of buying it a saucer of cream. The riddles were always simple-sounding at first, the kind of thing you’d hear from a child, what has a face but never smiles, what runs but never walks, and the trick of it was that the obvious answer was always wrong, and the cat would tilt its head at a wrong answer with an expression that managed to look almost sympathetic.
Getting a riddle wrong cost you nothing, officially. The cat never demanded payment, never threatened anything, only asked the next riddle, patient as anything, willing to sit there all night if that was what it took. The trouble started with the third or fourth wrong answer, when people began noticing that the riddles had started referencing details they hadn’t told anyone, a childhood dog’s name, a fear they’d never said aloud, small private things stitched into the wording so casually that you almost missed it until the answer clicked into place and left you cold.
By the fifth riddle, most people stopped answering at all, which the cat seemed to consider an answer in itself, nodding slowly and moving on to a new question anyway, one that somehow required a response even from silence. The ones who stayed the whole night, who kept answering out of stubbornness or pride or the simple human inability to leave a puzzle unfinished, tended to leave a little different than they’d arrived, quieter, prone to answering questions with questions of their own, laughing at pauses in conversation as though they’d heard a joke nobody else had told.
The pub kept the cat around because it was good for business, in its way, and because nobody had figured out how to ask it to leave without risking one more riddle on the way out. Regulars learned early to buy their round, listen politely, and never, under any circumstances, be the one who answered correctly, since nobody who’d ever gotten a riddle right had stayed to explain what happened next.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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