Freddie Firestone had been wrong. Bill wasn't finished in Hollywood...not just yet.
The Nameless Terror had been called the most promising horror script in the past thirty years. Of course, studios were skeptical. The Denbrough name was stamped on a lot of less-than-Oscar-worthy movies...klunkers, to be blunt. And his little disappearing act last year had certainly raised some eyebrows in Tinsel town. However, the sheer quality of the script shone out through all the bad press, luminous and impossible to ignore. Kind of like
(the deadlights)
Bill old boy had cast some kind of magic spell over it. Filming started almost immediately. A-list actors appeared like angels out of nowhere and practically begged Bill to be part of the project. Billions of dollars were spent on special effects and sets. Producers flocked to see him. If they had been any less subtle, Bill had told Audra after one bewilderingly prosperous day of filmmaking, they would have been waving rolls of hundred-dollar bills in his face.
Now, as he snuck barefoot down to his study, he wondered what all those producers would think if they knew he barely remembered writing a single word of the script they were shelling out for. And what the actors would think if they knew their tireless director went home each night and promptly forgot everything that had happened since they started filming.
Bill's study was a comfortable room surrounded by bookshelves with a grandiose oaken desk in the center. The desk had cost a good $900, but the computer perched on top of it had cost even more. Bill had always written by hand, but Audra had insisted on buying him the most ridiculously expensive word processor on the market. Now Bill was addicted to the thing-- this amazing machine which would have seemed like science fiction in his impossibly distant fifties childhood.
Funny how much he was thinking of that lately.
Bill walked right past the computer, which regarded him with the blind darkness of its off-screen. He instead made a beeline for a battered metal file cabinet that was sitting in the corner. He opened the bottom drawer with a startlingly loud clank and shuffled through the files within. Bill had a bizarre need...call it superstition, call it psychosis, call it compulsion...to have a hard copy of everything he ever wrote, be it novel, script, or short story. Audra had once joked that he had a copy of every grocery list he had ever penned somewhere in that drawer.
His hand closed around a manila file. It looked neat and inoffensive. However, when he turned it upside-down, just like the guts of Snowden exploding out of his flak jacket in Catch-22, all the file's dark secrets spilled out. They gathered on the desk and floor in random drifts. The room was totally dark except for the anemic green light of one digital clock on the bookshelf, and in this dim light, sans glasses, Bill was somehow able to make out every word he had supposedly written.
Time passed with sluggish unreality. He might have spent hours huddled on the floor, reading each page with the steady concentration of a determined maniac. However, to his own increasingly shock-numb mind, it seemed to take years. Years moving backwards.