At the time, while we stood there and drank in the odd beauty of the statue, and even as Duncan unerringly found our way home, and even after Mom and Dad, waiting in the backyard as the sun disappeared over the tree line, expressed their anger and disappointment at our “irresponsibility”—especially mine—I never once thought about whether Duncan might be crazy rather than lucky, touched rather than decisive. I just followed him. (Janice, I lied to you, just a little. It’s true I didn’t know exactly where to find the statue, but I had already heard about it from one of the older students at our school. He’d given me enough information that I had a fairly good idea of where to go. So it wasn’t preternatural on my part—it was based on a shred, a scrap, of information, as are all of my wanderings.)

Just as Duncan pushed me and himself farther than was sane that day, so too Duncan pushed Blythe Academy. It was not only the impending matter of Mary Sabon—it was the clandestine way in which Duncan used the Academy to further his primary lifelong interest: the gray caps and their plans.

I’ve no inkling about Duncan’s ability to teach (thanks a lot). I never sat in on his classes. I never even asked him much about the teaching. I was too busy. But I do know he discovered that he enjoyed “drawing back the veil of incomprehension” as he once put it (jokingly). The act of lecturing exercised intellectual muscles long dormant, and also exorcised the demons of self-censorship by letting Duncan speak, his words no longer filtered through his fear of the reading public. (Not to worry—I never had a real reading public, or I’d have continued to find publication somewhere. But, yes, I was fearful that I might one day develop one. Just imagine—someone actually reading those thick slabs of paper I spent years putting together.) He could entertain and educate while introducing his charges to elements of the mysterious he hoped might one day blossom into a questioning nature and a thirst for knowledge.

But was it all innocent education? Was there, perhaps, something else beneath it?

An examination of his lesson plans reveals a pattern not unlike the pattern formed by the poly-glut documents, maps, illustrations, and portraits that had once lined Duncan’s room at the Institute of Religiosity. (I never told you, but I received word only a year ago that, at Cadimon Signal’s request, the entire display had been lovingly preserved under glass, framed, and spirited away to some dark, vile basement in Zamilon for a prolonged period of zealot-driven dissection. What they hope to find among my droppings, I don’t know, but the thought of their clammy hands and ratty eyes pawing through my former wall adornments is a bit much.)