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
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."