The old man in the tavern was like a distinctive shadow cast by the irregular shape of the cliff. He could always be seen there, sitting in his well-worn chair, moments before, and then long after, twilight. He didn’t wear the workman’s clothes of the other men in the village. Neither the suntanned skin of a field tender, nor the beardless and singed face of a blacksmith could be seen on him. This man wore his beard long and proudly, never tucking it into his soft and loose robe.

  Neither did he cultivate an air of quiet strength about him, as the tired workmen did, as he gradually and inexorably converted alcohol into piss. He talked nearly every moment he wasn’t drinking. It wasn’t to anyone. Not to the sullen shapes at the bar. Not to the cat which sat nearby the man. One might have expected him to be talking to the cat, with how it followed closely at his heels when the old man was seen in the town. It even regarded the old man with a sleepy gaze occasionally.

  “…by the conversion matrix at a two-dot-oh-oh-one coefficient, you can see it’s inconsistent with the…jettison base matter at an angle of seventy-eight exactly…naught but fifteen remain after the blatant misuse and disregard by certain others who will go yet unnamed…until, and this is little known, the inverse reciprocal is equal to the square of…”

  Two men at the other end of the small room sat across from one another. As a pair deciding at random to observe the beauty of nature, they watched and listened to the old man.

  “Not an intelligible word in all that muck,” one said. This man wore a hat knitted of homespun wool.

  “It’s been-,” the other said before looking out the window, “err…an hour and a half by the sun.” This one wore a crude leather duster over a cotton shirt.

  The one in the knit cap looked at the one in the leather duster with a tired old glare.

  “The sun’s been down, you idiot. How can you judge the time by the sun when it’s night?”

  The one in the leather duster shrugged. “It’s been an hour and a half since the sun went down. I dunno.”

  They sipped their drinks. They listened to the old man.

  “…qualitative mutability of the crystalline…tertiary derivative with respect to…beyond that into Quarnam’s Area…if the artificial neutrality…”

  “He’s always got that cat near him,” the one in the knit cap said grumpily.

  “Y’know they say it’s a demon? It took a swipe at me the other day,” duster said.

  “O’course it’s a demon. What do you think drove the coot-..” but he cut himself off. “Where was that, then?” he asked instead.

  “Skinflint’s,” he said, indicating the village’s old blacksmith. “I was picking up that broken blade Da busted last year. Finally had the funds to have it repaired.”

  “Charged you through the nose, I bet,” knit-cap grunted. “But what was it doing there?”

  “He was chasing off one of them hounds with it. Threw it at’em. Says the wind caught it and sent it into the dolmen, but I think-”

  Knit-cap waved away the words, spilling some of the beer in his other hand.

  “No no. The cat.”

  “Oh, the cat. He was down there talking to Skinflint.” He indicated not the cat, but the old man.

  Knit-cap rubbed his chin, making a sound like sandpaper.

  “What was he doing there, I wonder,” he said.

  “Oh, that. They were talking about the nephew he took in. Y’know…the odd one.”

  “He’s only got the one.”

  “It sounded like haggling over apprenticeship.”

  “I don’t like the way it’s looking at me.” This was said by knit-cap because he had just noticed the furry black void had twisted its head to point its green eyes at them.

  On cue, they quickly tried to appear casual, causing duster’s beer to splash and knit-cap’s seat to briefly squeal against the wood floor.

  “Damned thing’s haunted me since I was a boy,” knit-cap said into his beer. “Almost wanna wring its neck until those green eyes bulge.”

  A few casually hurried sips later, duster looked up.

  The cat was gone.

  He whacked the back of knit-cap’s arm.

  They both realized the tavern had grown quiet.

  “Did he leave?” knit-cap asked without having looked around.

  Duster told him about the small stacks of money on the bar where the old man had been.

  “All that for one beer,” he added.

  If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

  “How could he keep drinking like that the whole time if it was one beer?”

  “He talks a lot. Maybe it’s why he doesn’t drink as much.” Duster shrugged.

  Knit-cap grabbed duster’s arm.

  “I got an idea,” he said on the second try, and took a moment to wonder why his greatest ideas always came at his least eloquent. He put his beer down.

  “Let’s follow him.” He took extra care to put the t before the s. “He can’t have gone far. And we know he’s headed back to his place.”

  “I dunno,” duster drawled.

  “Don’t you want to get back at that cat for swiping at you? And all the times before, where it would come out of nowhere, or it would take secrets back to the old man?”

  “You don’t actually think it listens to us, do you?”

  “Yeah? That wasn’t you just now, shutting up when it was looking at us?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Then let’s go get that cat.”

  The conspirators broke and stumbled into the night.

  “You go get one of the empty potato sacks Barnaby keeps out back. I’ll find out which way they’ve gone and put eyes on’em,” knit-cap said.

  Duster stalked back around the back of the tavern somewhat reluctantly, and knit-cap headed in the direction of the old man’s home.

  The village had been constructed, as most often are, around the essentials. The essentials for the people of this area, as most often are, were metalwork, paperwork, and beer. The old man lived on the edge of the village, away from the main roads in and out, in an attempt to garner peace and quiet in his studies. The villagers were content with this as he aided the community in ways they would never have thought to themselves, and he was far enough away such that when the peace and quiet was broken in the pursuit of knowledge, it was clearly broken on his side of the divide.

  Knit-cap stalked the byways of the small, sleeping market center, looking for all the world to any potential observers like someone drunk and up to no good.

  The old man was nowhere on the shortest path back to his home. He changed tack and backtracked. No old man to be seen in the market, on the edge of the fields, or at the well.

  It wasn’t until he decided to go back to the tavern that he walked by the blacksmith’s and saw the old man standing and staring at a window.

  Knit-cap ducked into some bushes.

  Peeking out from his cover, he saw the bright window wasn’t attached to the building, but instead, hovering in front of the wall.

  It was white, purple-y light. Knit-cap thought it was unearthly and nothing like the light of a candle. The surface of it was shifting, but he couldn’t make out features. He could see the building right through the rectangular bit of magic.

  Over the wizard’s shoulder, and across the gap, he was able to make out the nature of the shifting rectangle. Words were on it, skittering across like bugs.

  Knit-cap couldn’t read them, and not simply because he was illiterate, though he was. The symbols were completely foreign to him.

  “It’s written in the dead language of English,” came a voice nearby.

  Knit-cap nearly jumped vertically out of the bush in which he was hiding.

  It had sounded like the old man, only more coherent. But the old man was right where he was, looking at the magical rectangle in front of the mundane window into the blacksmith’s.

  There, where the voice had come from, was the old man’s black cat.

  “Demon!” knit-cap hissed.

  The cat licked its paw, somehow regretfully.

  “Yes, yes. Demon. Close your mind, puny mortal, and do not allow the larger universe to enter it.” The cat spoke without using its mouth. It also managed to speak entirely in sarcasm.

  Knit-cap crouched and spread his arms, telegraphing his intent to grab the cat.

  “Though I have come to prefer the ancient term daemon. It has more positive connotations, but never entered our lexicon.”

  The cat paused with its paw raised. In the same instant the drunkard lunged, the cat sprang between his legs, slowed to a trot, and was sitting calmly again. The drunk, at the same time, found one of his feet to be stuck to the ground, and was unable to abort the movement before his weight shifted and he face-planted.

  “I consider myself a helpful spirit. You can say I’ve come to terms with it.”

  Knit-cap sat up and rubbed his face. It was his stupid trick knee acting up again, that’s what tripped him.

  “I don’t appreciate your intentions. I may not have full access to the system like my counterpart,” and here the cat indicated the old man, still rapt by his screen, “but I can make your life-“

  “Gotcha!”

  Duster had arrived and slammed the open potato sack down on the monologuing cat. He scooped it up and held the sack in a fist, grinning stupidly at knit-cap.

  “What took you?” he said testily.

  “How about yourself? Couldn’t catch a cat?” Duster jiggled the sack.

  “-living hell. You could have at least waited for me to finish my joke. Demons? Hell? Quality content.” The voice was coming from inside the potato sack.

  They both looked nervously at it.

  “Did it talk?” Duster asked nervously.

  “It was-… It kinda was talking while I was trying to catch it, yeah,” knit-cap gulped.

  Fire spurted from the mouth of the sack.

  Duster yelped and dropped it.

  “If you wanted to catch a demon,” the voice from inside said, growing distorted and reverberating, “you’re going to need more than a potato sack.”

  The coarsely woven lump caught fire.

  Demonic wailing started quietly, growing steadily louder as the sack blackened under orange tongues.

  Duster turned to knit-cap.

  “It’s right. We didn’t think this through.”

  As one entity, they turned and fled.

  When the coast was clear, the wailing stopped and the fire died down. A black cat fought its way out of the sack and shook itself off. One brief bath later, and it sauntered over to the old man.

  “The two idiots are gone,” it said.

  “Good, good, Peezlebub.” He said it distractedly.

  With decades of experience aiding it, Peezlebub didn’t comment on this fact.

  Instead, it asked, “How’s the kid?”

  “What? Oh. My, yes. Come come.” The wizard lowered his divination screen for the cat to see.

  “His vitals are good. Lacking, but not extremely so. His intellect is nominal, his adaptability is unusually high, and, I think you’ll like this, he’s self-insulating.”

  As he spoke, he flicked his finger along the ephemeral glowing rectangle. The data whizzed past, stopping only briefly to emphasize the wizard’s words.

  “He’s quite remarkable,” he concluded.

  “I could have data-mined this in a fraction of the time,” the cat said, but to itself thought, Self-insulating? An invaluable trait for living in-system. It was for me, anyway.

  The old man chuckled. “I was so curious, I simply had to see for myself.”

  We’re of the same mind, you selfish dolt, the cat didn’t say. Instead it yawned and stretched.

  “I could do for some recharging,” it said instead. “If you pass me the data I can do some more crunching overnight for you.” Its voice belied the same curiosity the wizard felt. “I want to run his numbers against the known successes and failures. The ancients had some really interesting statistical models and I’m itching to try them now that we’ve got a live one.”

  The old man nodded and dispersed the screen. He stood up and looked in the physical window to the blacksmith’s.

  Inside was a small room furnished with a straw bed, an extinguished candle on the floor next to it, and the sleeping form of the blacksmith’s nephew.

  “They think you’re crazy for documenting your research with voice-to-text, you know,” it said petulantly.

  “I live with a cat on the edge of town and consort with demons,” he replied. “I think I’m crazy.”

  “Yeah. I think we’re crazy too."