All rushing throbbery aside, this was dangerous work for Duncan. He used the paths not according to his mood, but according to the by now well-known and ritualistic bumblings of Simon and Jonathan Balfours, the two sixty-year-old night watchmen, twins of (in) habit(s). He would also factor in the arrival of guests who might conceivably tour the academy at night and the random nocturnal walks of Bonmot. (However, by far the most dangerous person in all of Blythe Academy was Ralstaff Bittern, the gardener. What a tough old buzzard! Stringy as a dead cat, and twice as ugly. He had it in for me from the day I accidentally stepped on one of his precious rosebushes. He’d lie in wait for me at night, positioned strategically behind a willow tree, where he could see the entire courtyard. Many a night, I dared not brave his gaze.)

Indeed, Duncan came close to discovery every few weeks. The first time, Duncan, using the Path of Naked Necessity and disguised as a priest, rounded a corner and came face-to-face with a fellow Naked Necessitator: a third-year boy, as petrified as Duncan, the two of them sneaking so noisily through the gravel that neither had heard the other coming.

Duncan wrote later:

If he had uttered a single sound, I would have lived up to my surname—I would have shrieked and begun a babbling confession. But his face in the moonlight reflected such a remarkable amount of fear concentrated in such a small space that I found my tongue first and, shaky but firm, let him know that this—whatever this was—would not be tolerated at Blythe Academy. Continuing on, as much from my own exquisite terror as anything else, I proceeded to drive the demons out of the boy with such overwhelming success that I believe he—certain he could never match the conviction and fervor of the mouth-frothing apparition he met that night—eventually abandoned the priesthood as a vocation and started a brothel on the outskirts of the Religious Quarter. Meanwhile, as he ran away from me, gasping over gravel right out of the Academy, I was shaking so hard my teeth ground together. How close I had come to discovery! What was I to do?

What Duncan did, cynically, was volunteer for “tryst duty” as much as possible, which meant that he joined the ceaseless wanderings of the old night watchmen, supposedly on the lookout for those lean and compact boys, their dark wolf eyes shining, who might defy curfew in hopes of bedding a female student. (I performed a valuable service, whether hypocritically or not. And much of the time, frankly, we caught female students sneaking into the boys’ rooms.) This helped, but there were still unwelcome encounters with unexpected teachers or priests at unfortunate times—“Why, I was just checking the window to make sure it was securely locked”—and pricked buttocks from sudden jumps into rosebushes to avoid Bonmot, whom Duncan could not lie to. (The crushed bushes only made the gardener more relentless. Bittern complained to Bonmot several times, but Bonmot was not ready to believe him.) As his fellow history professor Henry Abascond once said to Duncan at a meeting of teachers, “A taste for the night life, have you? A taste for the dark, the shroud?” in typically pompous Abascond fashion. (And he wasn’t joking about it, much as others thought he was referring to my area of study. I thought for one paranoid moment that he and Bittern had formed a conspiracy to ruin me, but there was only one genuine conspiracy: my conspiracy to ruin myself.)