It

Bill is on a plane: “He is afraid, and not just of flying at eighteen miles a minute in this narrow fragile shell. He can almost feel Derry rushing at him” (221). He is realizing, as his memory returns, that all of his novels came from Derry. He remembers his bike, a Schwinn he called Silver after the Lone Ranger’s horse. He had bought it used with $24 he had saved. Silver was a fast bike, “and it was a damned good thing he could, because Silver had saved Bill Denbrough’s life in the fourth week of June 1958” (225) as they had raced away from the house on Neibolt Street. He can’t remember what happened to Silver.

As a child, Bill is riding Silver down the street with Eddie on the bike behind him. Henry, Belch, and Victor jump out of some bushes and try to grab them, but Bill pedals them away to the Barrens where they worked on the dam. Eddie begins to have an asthma attack and Bill props him up against the bank. Ben appears and agrees to stay with Eddie while Bill goes for a new aspirator on his bike.

When Bill rides his bike as fast as he can, everything else disappears for him. He no longer thinks of George’s death, or the piano that his mother no longer plays, or his father’s grief. At the pharmacy, Bill writes a note about Eddie’s asthma attack and gives it to the pharmacist. The pharmacist laughs to himself as he fills the prescription. He knows that Eddie is not actually sick, and that most of it is in his mother’s head. The aspirator is filled with what is essentially tap water.

As Bill rides back, he thinks about the murders. He believes they were all committed by the same person. He believes “that Derry really had changed, and that his brother’s death had signaled the beginning of that change” (237). When he gets back, Eddie puffs on the inhaler and begins to breathe easily. They introduce themselves to Ben. They talk about how they each wound up there that day and begin laughing, becoming friends and imitating Henry Bowers.

Ben looks at their broken dam and tells them how it could work better, then draws a diagram in the sand with a stick. The other boys are impressed at his intuitive architectural ability. They agree to meet there the next day to work on the dam. Bill rides away, and Eddie and Ben walk home together. Eddie tells Ben about what happened to George, and later “[t]hat night a terrible thing happened to Bill Denbrough. It happened for the second time” (245). He goes to George’s room and sits on his bed. Then he looks at George’s photo album: “A second look, that’s all. Just to convince yourself that it wasn’t real the first time. That the first time was just your head playing a trick on itself” (249). George had loved photographs, and the album is filled with pictures he asked people to give to him. The final picture is George’s school picture, taken the year he died: “George’s eyes rolled in the picture. They turned up to meet Bill’s own. George’s artificial say-cheese smile turned into a horrid leer” (250). Bill throws the book against the wall. From where it lands on the floor, blood begins to seep out of it.

A newspaper article reports that 10-year-old Edward L. Corcoran has been reported missing by his mother, Monica Macklin, and his stepfather Richard. In the article, Police Chief Borton urges readers to stay calm. He also says that the police do not consider the murders to have been committed by the same person, given the eclectic nature of the deaths.

The next day, the Derry News announces that the body of Edward’s younger brother, Dorsey, will be exhumed and examined. Dorsey had been brought to the hospital by Richard with a fractured skull. His stepfather claimed he had fallen off of a ladder. The boy had died shortly after arrival. Three days later the paper states that Richard has been arrested and charged with Dorsey’s mother. The coroner has ruled that Dorsey was beaten to death with a blunt instrument.

A day later, the paper reports that, according to a schoolteacher, Edward was often bruised when he came to school. Edward’s mother denies the allegations against her husband. A nursery school teacher is quoted as saying that Dorsey claimed his father had hurt his fingers badly, the week before his death, because he had gotten their freshly-waxed floor dirty.

In July, Richard confesses to the bludgeoning death of Dorsey. He breaks down in court in hysterics and says he doesn’t know why he did it. After sentencing, Richard says he does not know where Edward is and denies that he hurt him. Richard will commit suicide in prison, leaving a note that reads: “I saw Eddie last night. He was dead” (258).

The day school ended, Edward avoided going home because his parents had been fighting a lot, which often resulted in Richard's beatings. He had walked along the Canal, thinking, when “[a] hand closed around Eddie’s foot” (262). When he looks down, it is Dorsey, dressed in the clothes he had been buried in. His head is caved in from the hammer Richard had used on him, and he is smiling. Edward shakes loose and runs into a tree, briefly knocking himself out. When he wakes, he begins walking home and hears something following him. When he looks back, he sees the “Creature from the Black Lagoon” (265) and knows it wants to drag him into the Canal to eat him. He trips on a bench and the creature catches him. It kills him by pulling his head off: “As Eddie’s picture of what It was began to fade, It began promptly to change into something else” (266).

The next morning, Mike Hanlon rides his bike towards the Canal. He finds a pocketknife with the initials E.C. on it. Then he sees blood on the ground. A memory of a bird tries to force its way into his head—“the one he had seen at the Kitchener Ironworks” (268)—but he does not allow himself to think about it. A seagull screams and Mike thinks about what had happened to him that spring.

Sometimes his father would leave Mike notes for areas of the town he wanted him to go explore, to feed his mind and sense of adventure. One day the note says he should go to Pasture Road and bring back a souvenir: “Be back before dark. You know why” (277). Pasture Road takes him to the burnt remains of the Kitchener Ironworks. He looks into the top of a massive smokestack. He scares himself by imagining the giant bird from the movie Rodan down there in the dark, then continues exploring. For his souvenir, he finds a gear and puts it in his pocket.

Before he goes, he looks down into a large pipe called a cellarhold: “Nested in the cellarhold, the bird looked up” (280). The bird has an orange breast and gray wings. He runs and the bird explodes out of the pipe, diving and scraping the back of his neck with its claws. The bird is bigger than he is. He hides in the smokestack, hoping that the bird will be too big to fit inside and follow him. The bird forces itself in and Mike imagines that it will get stuck and they will die there together. He throws a sharp piece of broken tile at the bird and it withdraws. He will later tell the group that he feels as if something helped him throw the tile harder.

The bird withdraws and Mike piles up more pieces of tile. When it appears, he hits it several times until it flies away. At home, he shows his father the gear he brought. His father senses that something is bothering Michael but does not press him for answers.

Michael’s memory ends and he looks again at the dried blood at the edge of the Canal. He hears a splashing sound. He throws the knife into the water and gets on his bike. The next day he reads about Edward Corcoran in the paper and realizes that the knife he had found bore Edward’s initials.

Eddie Kaspbrak is driving from Boston towards Derry. As he pays a toll, he thinks of Ben Hanscom’s valuable silver dollars: “Wasn’t it Bill or Beverly or Ben who once used one of those silver cartwheels to save their lives?” (292). He remembers the day Bill got the idea to build the dam, and how Ben had shown them how.

The dam that Ben designed will work: “Ben, who had seemed so timid and unsure the day before, became a confident general once he was fully involved in the actual construction of the dam” (296). The creek begins to flood, and the dam stops it and turns it into a pool. Richie Tozier and Stanley Uris arrive. When they stop that evening, Richie tells Ben that he’s “a genius” (302). Richie gives them all cigarettes and they smoke. Eddie thinks about how often Richie is in trouble. He can’t ever keep his mouth shut, which is not helped by his desire to do impressions. He wanted “to become the world’s greatest ventriloquist” (303). Eddie thinks that all of Richie’s voices sound the same.

When they finish, Eddie sees Bill looking into the woods and “was suddenly sure that Bill was going to open his mouth and say something terrible, something which would change everything” (306). Bill tells them about what happened with George’s photo album, but no one tells him that he is crazy. Eddie has a memory of a voice, whispering: “Come back here. I’ll blow you for free” (307). He looks at his friends and sees that they are all taking Bill seriously, and in Eddie’s view, it looks like it’s because they have their own stories.

Eddie thinks about seeing “the face of the leper six weeks ago” (308). On Saturdays he would often play at the trainyards at the end of Neibolt Street. One day a hobo had crawled out from under the porch of a house on Neibolt Street and offered Eddie oral sex for a quarter. One of his nostrils had rotted away and his face was covered in scabs. Eddie rode away on his bike.

At the dam, he tells the others the story. Richie tells him that the man hadn’t had leprosy, but syphilis. Eddie tells them the rest of the story. After that day when he was chased, “[t]he house at 29 Neibolt Street had taken on a kind of glow in Eddie’s imagination” (314). Six weeks later, he returned to look under the porch. There was no one there. Eddie crawled under and looked through a cellar-level window. A rotting face appeared: a leper. Eddie got out from the under the porch and the leper followed him. It was wearing a clown suit. As Eddie rode away, he heard it whisper: “It won’t do you any good to run, Eddie” (318).

Ben tells them that he saw the clown as well, and that to him it had looked like a mummy. Richie tells them that they must have been dreaming, but it seems to Eddie that Richie is hiding something. Stanley says he hasn’t seen anything, but he is not convincing. He eventually reveals that “[i]t wasn’t a clown” (321), but they are interrupted by a cop named Mr. Nell who begins shouting at the mess their dam has caused.

Richie drives into Derry for the first time since leaving as a child. His memories are relentless, and he worries that he is not going to be able to control his fears. He remembers Mr. Nell at the dam and does an imitation of his voice. He remembers Ben taking responsibility for the dam, even though he thought he would get into trouble. The scene switches to the past.

Bill and Eddie say they gave Ben the idea, and Richie and Stan echo them. Mr. Nell tells Ben that the dam has most likely backed up the sinks of hundreds of homes in Derry, and Ben begins to cry. Mr. Nell tells him that it will be all right but insists that if they come to the Barrens to play, they must do so together, never alone. Then he tells them to pull the dam apart while he watches, so he knows that it’s done.

Later that day, Bill and Richie are walking together. Richie says that he can imagine a man putting on a clown suit and killing kids, but he isn’t sure how George’s picture could be part of that story. Bill thinks it was George’s ghost, and George wanted to scare him because he blamed Bill for his death. Richie tells him that it isn’t his fault, and Bill feels better: “The boat had killed George, but Richie was right—it hadn’t been like handing George a loaded gun to play with” (335). Bill starts to cry, and Richie hugs him. He says that they should look at the picture again together, to see if they can find a clue about what is killing the kids.

In George’s room, Bill picks up the photo album where it is lying on the floor. The pages are covered in maroon stains. Richie looks through the album, but George’s school picture is not there. The last picture is now an old black and white photo of Derry, showing the Canal. There are two boys in the picture, walking by the Canal: the boys are Richie and Bill, “in a picture three times as old as they were” (341). The picture begins to move. Cars drive down the road and people walk up and down the sidewalks.

The Richie and Bill in the picture walk towards the Canal. A clown with George’s face leaps up over the edge of the Canal and tries to grab them. Bill puts his fingers into the picture to stop them and Richie yanks his arm back. The photo album falls on the floor. There are now bleeding slashes across Bill’s fingers. Bill opens the album again and returns to the Canal photo. The two boys are gone. A balloon peeks up over the edge of the Canal. They talk and agree that the clown is what they are all seeing. It pretends to be other things, and it is what is killing all of the children.

The next day, Richie, Beverly, and Ben go to a werewolf movie at the Aladdin Theater. They sit in the balcony. Henry, Belch, and Victor are on the lower level, and they want to hide from them. Richie has almost convinced himself that the incident with the photo album had been a hallucination.

When the movie ends, Ben tells Richie that Bowers saw them. They hurry outside but Henry, Victor, and Belch catch them near the entrance to an alley. Beverly steps in front of Ben and shouts for them to leave him alone. Richie trips Henry when he moves towards Beverly. Seeing Henry threaten Beverly, Ben throws a garbage can at him and knocks him back down. Then he tackles Victor. They manage to escape. Blocks away, they sit on a bench together. Then they go into the Barrens to play. Beverly touches a bruise on her face and says her dad hit her the day before for breaking a stack of dishes.

Bill Denbrough walks out of the bushes and sees them. He’s with a kid named Bradley. Richie sees Bradley and thinks that he is not one of them. Bradley is not part of what Richie thinks of as “the Losers’ Club” (366). The thought scares him: “We’re being drawn into something. Being picked and chosen. None of this is accidental. Are we all here yet?” (367).

Five days later, Bill and Richie to the house on Neibolt Street to look under the porch. Bill says that if the clown killed George, he wants to kill it. Richie asks him: “What are you going to do if it’s not a man, Billy? What if it really is some kind of monster?” (370). Bill says they will figure it out. He has brought his father’s pistol and a powerful slingshot. Richie has brought a packet of sneezing powder.

They crawl under the porch and see the broken window. Then they crawl through into the cellar. A door opens at the top of the stairs. A werewolf wearing a Derry high school jacket comes down the steps. Richie knows it is the teenage werewolf from the movie he saw at the Aladdin Theater. They manage to get outside, and Bill shoots the werewolf several times, including one shot in the head. When it crawls through the window after them, Richie throws the sneezing powder into its face. He starts cursing at it, doing an impression of Mr. Nell’s Irish cop voice. He sees that it is in pain: “Bill might have hurt it with his dad’s pistol, but Richie had hurt it more…first with the Voice of the Irish Cop, and then with the sneezing powder” (384).

They get onto Bill’s bike and ride away. As the werewolf chases them, Richie sees the name RICHARD TOZIER stitched onto its jacket. They get away on the bike. When they finally stop, they both begin sobbing.

Beverly is on a plane, heading towards Derry. She remembers the names of her childhood friends. She thinks about a scar on her palm, which she had done to herself with a piece of glass as they had made each other a promise to come back to Derry if they needed to: “Tom’s evil is a small and petty thing compared with the evil waiting for her in Derry. If there is a compensation, it is that Bill Denbrough will be there” (397). Then Beverly remembers a scene from her past.

In her childhood, Beverly hears a voice in her bathroom sink’s drain, asking for help. There is a rotten smell. It smells like part of the Barrens to her. The voice says, “We all want to meet you, Beverly” (399). A stream of blood erupts out of the drain, splashing the mirror and walls and the lightbulb. Beverly screams and her father comes in. He can’t see the blood: “There was blood, blood everywhere… and her father didn’t see it” (402). He slaps her arm, then punches her in the stomach as he tells her that she has to grow up. She tells him that she saw a spider in the drain and apologizes for scaring him.

In her bed, she prays to God to make the blood disappear by morning. The next day, she cooks breakfast for her father and then talks with her mother after he leaves. Her mother asks if he has ever touched her, and Beverly says no. When she is alone, Beverly cleans the windows. Finally, she goes in the bathroom. Some of the blood is gone, but most of it is still there.

That afternoon she goes out and finds Eddie, Ben, and a boy named Bradley pitching pennies. She plays with them and wins. Bradley accuses her of cheating and Ben shouts at him to take it back. When Bradley threatens to hit him, Ben smiles: “After tangling with Henry Bowers twice and coming out ahead not once but twice, Ben Hanscom was not about to be terrorized” (411). Bradley runs away after calling Beverly’s mother a “whore” (412). Beverly starts crying.

They get ice cream together at a soda fountain. Beverly kisses Ben’s cheek and thanks him for standing up for her. Stanley arrives and sits with them. Beverly tells them that she was crying because of what had happened in her bathroom. She tells them the story of the voice and the blood.

They go to her apartment and look in the bathroom. They can all see the blood. Stanley says that they should clean it. They work together and get rid of most of the blood. Beverly watches Stanley when they are done: “His face was set, almost stern. And later Beverly would think that perhaps only Stanley realized that they had taken another step toward some unthinkable confrontation” (417). They take the cleaning rags and towels to a Laundromat to wash them.

Ben tells her she is not alone. He tells her about his experience with the clown, Bill tells her about the photo album, and Eddie tells her about the leper. Stan tells them that he was in Memorial Park “where the Standpipe is” (421). Eddie says several kids had drowned in the Standpipe, which supplied most of Derry’s water. There were stairs going up the outside of the Standpipe, and from the top they could look down and see the water.

Stan’s story takes place two months earlier, when he is birdwatching at Memorial Park. He watches a group of birds through his binoculars. A noise like a car backfiring eventually scares them off. It is growing dark and Stanley gets the impression that the Standpipe is floating. He sees that there is a heavy door in its base and the door is open. That was the loud noise he heard. When he goes to the door, he sees a twisted padlock on the ground, mangled as if it had been ripped apart. He hears calliope music inside the Standpipe and goes in. He begins climbing the stairs and the door slams shut behind him.

He hears wet footsteps coming down the stairs. He runs down but can’t open the door. He asks who is there, and a voice replies: “The dead ones, Stanley. We’re the dead ones” (431). He feels his bird identification book in his slicker and takes it out. Without knowing why, he holds it open in front of him and begins shouting the names of the birds. The door opens behind him and he escapes. When he looks back, he sees two sets of legs on the bottom steps.

When Stanley finishes his story, the others believe him. Stanley doesn’t want to do anything about it because he only wants to forget. Ben says they need to tell Bill and that they can’t do nothing because the clown will keep killing other kids if they don’t try. Stanley can’t explain it to them, but he realizes that, worse than the fear he felt at seeing the dead boys in the Standpipe, was the “offense” (436) to rationality that they symbolized. He believes that if he had seen Jesus walking on water, it wouldn’t look like a miracle: “It would look like an offense” (437) to the way things were supposed to be.

At home, Beverly uses a tape measure to determine how far down the bathroom drain goes. Something pulls it from below and it slips out of her hands. A voice says that she can’t fight, and that “you’ll die if you try” (438). Blood begins rising out of the drain.