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Ernest hammered out a letter to Ethel the next day, the words tepid with a feigned sweetness. His pride had taken a hit; she'd walked away the champ from their emotional tug-of-war and left him grappling with his work. His heart sank as her silence stretched into the third day. It gnawed at him—was he just another discarded plaything to her? The sting of embarrassment burned his cheeks. He tore apart his feelings, analyzing and dulling his once fierce desire bit by bit. Work bellowed its siren call, offering up the real purpose of life—not some fleeting romance. Ethel began to fade into a misty figment of his past. He'd never truly been all in; he realized that now. And his book—it was nothing more than a paper stage for her shadow, not Ethel herself.

He once pinged the topic off Reginald in casual talk. Reginald spun the notion that the modern appetite demanded even snap-shooters to dodge raw reality in favor of their own stained vision of things. "Reality's skin never fits in fiction," Reginald mused, "Life's candid shots are replaced by art's chosen portraits."

With this kernel, Ernest sculpted a new version of Ethel from his thoughts, one more vivid than her own flesh and blood could ever be. Time was cruel though, only sparing him scraps to invest in his "Leontina." When he did manage to bury himself in the pages after cranking out money-makers for print, it was then that his mind would waltz with his characters till exhaustion pulled down the curtain on his consciousness.

As sleep finally swathed him in its fragile cocoon, his brain danced macabre waltzes, spawning nightmares instead of dreams. Creatures grim and uncanny crept down the corridors of his sleep-starved nights, their grinning visages bearing down on him with suffocating weight. He'd wake up still under siege by the night's phantoms, weariness etched into his face, carving tiny canyons at each corner of his mouth—an unsettling half-smile born of depletion and dread. His nerves were fraying at unseen edges as he became brittle with hysteria. Late into those solitary hours as he pieced together words for faceless readers, terror would whisper over his shoulder—only jolted away by the mundane drone of an elevator reminding him where he truly was.

In one of his morbid moods he wrote a sonnet which he showed to Reginald after the latter's return from a short trip out of town. Reginald read it, looking at the boy with a curious, lurking expression.

O gentle Sleep, turn not thy face away,

But place thy finger on my brow, and take

All burthens from me and all dreams that ache;

Upon mine eyes a cooling balsam lay,

Seeing I am aweary of the day.

But, lo! thy lips are ashen and they quake.

What spectral vision sees thou that can shake

Thy sweet composure, and thy heart dismay?

Perhaps some murderer's cruel eye agleam

Is fixed upon me, or some monstrous dream

Might bring such fearful guilt upon the head

Of my unvigilant soul as would arouse

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The Borgian snake from her envenomed bed,

Or startle Nero in his golden house.

"Nice work," Reginald said, dropping the stack of pages with a thud; "when the hell did you come up with this?"

"While you were off gallivanting somewhere else," Ernest shot back with a smirk.

"Got it," Reginald muttered.

But the way he said it, there was a chilling undertone that instantly got Ernest on edge.

"What's that supposed to mean?" he pressed, a surge of paranoia nipping at him.

"Nothing at all," Reginald answered, his face a mask of eerie calm, "except it's crystal clear your head's still a mess."

Ethel Brandenbourg felt her heart ripped and tossed like a ship in a tempest's wrath, all after Ernest had vanished from her life. Before she could steady her frenzied emotions, his letter struck like lightning, throwing her back into turmoil. Amidst his eloquent phrasing, she sensed a hollow echo—a dissonance amidst the harmony—that smothered the whispers of affection that once danced between them. His words held the cool shine of gems yet failed to kindle warmth within her; they missed that natural grace which can endow even the most clichéd sentiments with an aura of wonder. It dawned on Ethel that she was but a passing enchantment in the boy's eyes—a spell weakened at Reginald's merest utterance. She imagined Reginald's spectral grin lurking within the lines of Ernest’s note, mocking her from the shadows with a victor's glee.

Logic eventually crept up to her and muttered its sobering truth: entrusting one's heart to a youth was folly—a path fraught with demands and agitation. She pictured Ernest expecting her spirit to dance to every rhythmic pulse of his life, demanding attentiveness for dead-to-her chapters. Falsehood would thus seep into their shared existence, leaving its rancid taste. For when lovers are mismatched, Love must rouge its cheeks and sometimes don a masquerade. Its whispers may be sweetened with honey, yet it’s an escort for disappointment and anguish.

These warnings Ethel repeated in her mind like an ominous mantra as she tried to forge an aloof, deliberate response to Ernest's impassioned scrawl. Rewriting it more times than she cared to count, each draft grew harder to sculpt until the words rang false and laborious. So she laid the letter aside—perhaps for clarity or reprieve—but upon revisiting her words they appeared as strangers; contrived and twisted out of shape by forces unseen. In this moment of stark revelation, she did what felt only natural: she tore the paper asunder, letting each torn piece flutter aimlessly—like so many unspoken thoughts—before they found solace in oblivion.

Weeks had trickled by since Ernest last consumed her every thought. It was one mundane September morning, as she idly thumbed a magazine, that his name leaped off the contents page, seizing her attention with a jolt. The boy's haunting image flooded back to her—a wistful specter—and with it, a rush of emotion trembled through her heart. Tremors danced in her fingers as she sliced through the magazine's pages, tears blurring her vision, distorting the words of his poem into pools of ink.

His verse struck her like a thunderclap of somber genius—a procession of shadowy monks lost in unearthly prayer, parading across the page in a macabre dance. The poem was an echo chamber of despair, a cry from a soul perched on the dreadful cliff-edge between sanity and the yawning abyss of madness, watching helplessly as lunacy's pallid moon rose over the horizon of its existence. From his words, an unsettling disquiet transfused into her, latching onto her psyche.

And then—as if seized by Stephen King’s knack for unearthing terror in the ordinary—her third eye blinked open with prophetic clarity. She could almost smell the potent fear that had laced the poet's essence, could almost see amidst those trembling lines the lurking silhouette of Reginald Clarke—the puppeteer behind this ominous play.

It was like waking into a nightmare so visceral it paralyzed—the kind that nestled deep within Stephen King's novels. Before her mental gaze materialized Clarke, not as man but an amorphous creature from the depths of the darkest ocean trench. A repulsive being wrapped in seaweed and slime, its countless gaping maws suckling greedily at her spirit while countless more tentacles constricted around her, squeezing the breath from her chest.

Chilled to the bone and with eyes squeezed shut against this terror made flesh from past horrors, she recognized in this tortuous vision what she must do. It was up to her now; only she could wrest Ernest Fielding from the malevolent tendrils enshrouding his life—a sinister entanglement so evident now in this moment of stark revelation tinged with the dread weaved by King's own hand.