It

Mike writes on Valentine’s Day, 1985, that two more children have disappeared. He calls the police to ask if he can see the crime scene photos, and they tell him no. Mike says they are getting annoyed with him and have suggested that he see a psychiatrist.

Later, he fights the urge to call the others. He is not ready: “If I call them now, they may think I’m crazy. Worse than that, what if they don’t remember me at all?” (445). He says that when it is time, he will know, because “they will hear the voice of the Turtle” (445).

Mike attempts to recount the history of the fire at a club called the Black Spot, but stalls, writing instead that his father had served in the war while encountering horrible racism from the white officers. He tells Mike that after the war, he moved the family to Derry, where things turned out to be even worse. He tried to keep chickens, but Butch Bowers, Henry’s father, poisoned them. Then he had painted a swastika on their barn door.

Mike's father imparts that “in a way it was the fire made [him] a man” (451). He explains that the fathers of some of the kids Mike goes to school with are the ones who lit the fire. “Part of it was just Derry” (451), which had a high percentage of members of The Legion of White Decency, which he describes as the Northern version of the Ku Klux Klan. He says the Legion was just a seed, and that Derry was the perfect ground in which it could grow.

He wants Mike to know that he does not believe that the fire happened because they were black—most of the sixty people killed were black: “It seems that bad things, hurtful things, do right well in the soil of this town” (453). It is four years before he thinks Mike is old enough to hear about the fire itself. He would tell him on his deathbed as he died of cancer. This is also when Mike's father continued the story about Butch Bowers. He had only wanted to be paid for the worth of the chickens: $200. Butch had grudgingly paid, but then went around telling everyone that he was going to burn the Hanlon family’s lives. Mike’s father had caught Butch and stuck a gun under his jaw. He threatened to kill him if he ever called him a name again, or if he heard that he was talking about his family. There was never any more trouble with Butch.

Mike writes that it had been five days since he started trying to write about the Black Spot fire. Now the library is closed, and he writes: “I think I’ve finally found my way to my father’s final story” (459). Mike is 15 when his father tells him the story. The army men visited several clubs to drink and dance, but the blacks were not allowed there. Major Fuller dedicated a piece of land in what would become Memorial Park to a club that would be called the Black Spot. Will Hanlon and his friends fixed it up and it became popular enough that white people started to grumble about it: “We knew that the white boys let you race against them, but if it starts to look like you are getting ahead, why, somebody just breaks your legs so you can’t run as fast” (467).

Among the men, they realized that they had several musicians. They started a jazz combo that began performing on weekends. The club becomes more popular and even more white people start to visit: “The Legion of Decency ended it. They came in their white sheets early that November and cooked themselves a barbecue” (469). They had baseball bats dipped in gas that were burning, which they threw through the windows into the kitchen. The wall between the kitchen and the club exploded and fire rushed into the dance area. He tells Mike that it’s okay if the story gives him nightmares: “In nightmares we can think the worst. That’s what they’re for, I guess” (474).

The bodies were piled up against the doors, trapping people inside. Will’s friend Trev got out through a window, took a truck, and drove it through the wall, allowing more people to escape through the opening. Mike’s father is heavily medicated. He tells Mike that at the end, as the burning people were running out of the building, he saw a bird that was “maybe sixty feet from wingtip to wingtip” (477). He says it grabbed a man and floated away with him like a balloon.

On March 1, 1985, Mike writes that he knows It has returned. He had fallen asleep in the library while writing. When he wakes, there is a balloon tied to his reading lamp. His own face is on the balloon, blood running out of the eye sockets where his eyes had been. He screams and the balloon pops.