Could you clarify the context?

" plays on a classic horror trope—a school after hours. Little Puck plays Miss Vale, a teacher infamous among her students for being incredibly strict and mean.

The final confrontation was not a dramatic exorcism. There was no ritual, no dramatic tearing at his scalp. Instead, it was a sequence of small, stubborn refusals that grew into a habit. When the whisper offered him the perfect theft—a ledger that would set a merchant on his knees—he let it happen in the city without him. He waited instead and returned the ledger anonymously, ruining the snare he had once set. When it offered him leverage over a woman who had rebuked him, he refused to take it. He gave up the thrill and kept the relationship. He practiced patience the way a tired man learns to sleep: with the discipline of someone who has been denied it for years.

He was a little puck once, black and slick, and he moved like a lie across the ice. But he is still now. He is heavy. He feels the squirming within the calcium of his shell. He did not invite them, but they are there, a writhing civilization in the space where his bounce used to be. He is no longer hard. He is parasited full. He waits not for the stick, but for the inevitable pop.