INSTANT REPLAY | REDDIE

- 00 | INSTANT REPLAY

♥

It started when he was ten.

At first, he had dismissed them as normal dreams. Dreaming about your friends was normal, wasn't it? Even if the dreams took place decades before you had been born, they were still normal, weren't they? He was ten, his doctor reasoned with his mother when he first brought them up. He probably heard a story about it once, and now he's dreaming about it.

Eddie didn't see that doctor again.

Sometimes the dreams were fun. It was like he was living a double life. He would get double the play time, after all. The only difference was that he could remember the dreams, but while he was in them, he couldn't remember the normal stuff, like television that was colorful, and phones that didn't have to be connected to the wall. When he was dreaming, that was all there was. The dream.

Eddie didn't like to talk about his dreams. It made his mother upset, which made him upset. He didn't like upsetting his mother. Sometimes the doctors tried to ask him about it. Eddie would get antsy, squirming around in his seat and casting nervous glances in his mother's direction. It wasn't until she gave him an encouraging nod that he would settle down and tell the nice doctors about his dreams.

The most fun part about falling asleep, in Eddie's opinion, was that he knew he was just going to get to see his friends again. All six of them, in fact, but his bestest was Stuttering Bill Denbrough. They had been friends for five whole years now, ever since preschool. They met Ben Hanscom on the beach one day over the summer while they were trying to build a moat around their sand castle. Henry Bowers, a boy who was a lot bigger than Eddie, had been dumping buckets of water on their heads and kicking their castle to the ground all day. That was when Ben started to show up in the dreams, only there, they had been trying to build a dam in the woods that they called the Barrens, and instead of just kicking over their castle, Henry had beat them up real bad. Ben waited with Eddie while Bill went to refill his inhaler, which had accompanied Eddie on his travels into the dream world.

Stanley Uris was in Bill's class during second grade when Eddie had been put with another teacher. It upset him a little bit that Bill had made a new friend, but he ended up finding his own friend in Richie Tozier. The boy had walked up to him while he was on the swings with glasses that were way too big for him and a mischievous grin. That was what he called it, at least. Eddie had looked up the word later in the dictionary, but he didn't think that it matched the description very well. To him, Richie had just been smiling.

Stan and Richie started filtering into the dreams as well, and both had been there on the day that they built the dam. They had gotten into a whole lotta trouble, 'specially cause Richie liked to do voices in Eddie's dreams, and he made lots of jokes that went too far sometimes.

Bev joined the dreams on accident. Eddie had been paired with her on a project that they worked on throughout the week in third grade, and she had slipped in. After that, Eddie kept talking to her, and then started inviting her to his house when the rest of his friends came over.

Mike delivered newspapers, and one time he had been putting up posters for his lost dog while Eddie and his friends were outside. They had each taken a few papers and gone out searching. They found the dog with Henry Bowers and his goons, and it become somewhat of a scuffle. That was the first time Eddie had gotten into a fight outside of the dreams. He went home sporting a cut lip and dirt all over his knees. His mother hadn't been too happy, and he ended up crying, but it had been the most exciting thing to happen in his waking world. That was when Mike joined their gang and steadily made his way into the dreams, where Eddie's face got busted up by a bunch of rocks instead of a few sloppy punches.

For the most part, Eddie's dreams were calm. They happened over the course of the years, and the dangerous bits were spread out evenly. He hadn't told any of his friends that he dreamed about them, at his mother's very special request. Sometimes Eddie woke up and had to use his aspirator, and other days he woke up perfectly fine. Sometimes, like the day after he dreamt about the rock war, he woke up and his body hurt in places where he wasn't injured. There was one very scary time when his mother had woken him up in the middle of jumping off the Quarry. His eyes had flown opened, and he woke up feeling like he was still free-falling. It had taken hours for him to calm his mother down, even though he was crying harder than she was.

Eddie knew 1950's Derry almost as well as he knew his own Derry. Sometimes he would go places with his friends and realize that he had been there just the previous night, only it had looked totally different. They had never gone to the Quarry, or into the Barrens, but he had a feeling that both of those places hadn't changed much at all. His mother would never let him go there, though. He was only ten, after all. He could fall and hurt himself, or catch hypothermia if the water was too cold. He wasn't even sure he knew how to swim as well as he did in his dreams, because he had never been in deep enough water to find out.

One time, Eddie had been at Bill's house playing with his friend's little brother, Georgie. He was only six, which meant Eddie had to be careful, he knew that. Although, for some reason, it always felt like Georgie was being more careful with Eddie than Eddie was being with Georgie, as if the younger child thought it ought to be the other way around. The six year old was already almost as tall as Eddie, which the elder child didn't understand, but he was afraid to ask his mother because he knew that if he worried her it would mean another week of his summer vacation lost to being locked up in his room with medicine that tasted worse than the water he accidentally swallowed at the Quarry the night before.

The day that Georgie ran away was a stormy one. Eddie was confused about how a six year old could get so far away from home without his mother noticing. In the fifties, maybe, because he had discovered that children his age and younger had much more freedom then than he did in the current world while he was awake. Yet, somehow, Georgie had managed to get himself lost. He had been playing with a little plastic boat in his front yard when it happened. Eddie was at school, talking with Richie about how he hoped Bill would get better soon. He had a cold and had stayed home that day.

The police looked all over town, or so Eddie's mother said, and he believed her. In reality, Georgie had been found just up the street, crying and pointing at a sewer drain where his boat had fallen down. But Eddie didn't know that. He only knew what his mother had told him, and what she told him was that Georgie Denbrough had gotten lost because he wandered too far away from home without an adult, so if Eddie ever did that, then he might get lost, too. And if he got lost in rain like this, then it could take a while for people to find him, and the longer he was out there, the sicker he was going to get. He didn't want to end up like his daddy, did he? No, Eddie did not.

So over the years, Eddie didn't go too far. At least, not on his own. His group of friends weren't allowed to go very far, anyway. They mostly just hung out at each others' houses. Every night, Eddie dreamt. It was strange, though. In his dreams, the police found Georgie, but he had been missing an arm. Georgie died in Eddie's dreams, and he didn't come back, like Eddie had hoped he would.

Years went by, and while in real life Bill's stutter got better, in the dreams it got worse. Bill was happy as happy could be when Eddie was awake, but when he was sleeping, Bill almost never smiled. It wasn't until seven years later that Eddie started to realize that maybe living a double life wasn't so glamorous after all.

It wasn't until seven years later that he dreamt about the man under the porch.