It

They meet at the library and drink together. Beverly remembers that Mike brought a photograph album to the Barrens when they “were digging out the clubhouse” (711). Richie remembers that they went back to Neibolt Street. Mike goes to the refrigerator to get more beer. Balloons float out. Stanley’s head is on the top shelf next to the beer. Stanley’s mouth is full of feathers. He opens his eyes and they are silver. It winks, then disappears. One of the balloons says: “THE LOSERS ARE STILL LOSING BUT STANLEY URIS IS FINALLY AHEAD” (714).

Three days after the rock fight, Mike meets them in the Barrens. They are digging a hole in the ground that Ben says he can turn into a clubhouse. Mike can tell they want to tell him something. Bill says that they are a club, and he can be in it, if he will keep their secrets. Beverly says, “The kids who have been killed. We know who’s doing it, and it’s not human” (719). They each tell Mike their stories, and he thinks: “There are seven of us here” (720).

Mike says he saw the clown during the Fourth of July parade. Pennywise had been handing out balloons to kids, but most of the kids had not wanted them. He had winked and waved at Mike. Mike says that he is going to bring his father’s photo album to them to show them some pictures. He tells them about the bird, and they believe him. After Mike leaves, Bill says they should make a silver bullet.

A week later the clubhouse is almost done. Mike shows them the photo album after they finish working. He says he started looking at it again after the parade because he knew he had seen the clown before. One of the pictures is an 18th century woodcut that shows six children watching a clown juggle. There is a picture from 1856 of the clown playing the shell-game with drunken loggers. An 1891 picture shows the Kitchener Ironworks opening; Pennywise is in the background turning a handspring for a group of children. There is a picture of a parade on the day World War II ends, with Pennywise marching in the parade. The pictures begin to move.

The clown sees them and rushes forward in the picture. He climbs a lamppost in the foreground and presses his face against the picture, which bulges out of the album. He says he’ll kill them all, and then he changes into the respective monsters that each of them has seen. Stanley shuts the book. Bill thinks It is afraid: “Really scared for the first time in Its long, long life” (741). Stan screams that he doesn’t want it to be real but admits that he saw it.

Mike shows the others the balloons at the library. Richie remembers where the burning in his eyes comes from: “We saw It come!” (745). He tells the others: “The rest of you don’t know or maybe you don’t remember, because you left. Me and Mikey, we were the last two Injuns in the smoke-hole” (746). He says the pain in his eyes came from the smoke. Richie tries to explain what happened to them all in the smoke-hole and the scene reverts to the past.

The clubhouse is finished. Ben is telling them about something called a Smoke Hole Ceremony. He says that when Indians needed to make a big decision, they would sit in a hole whose top was covered, save for a small vent. They would light a fire. If they could endure the smoke long enough, they would have visions that they could use to make their decisions. Ben thinks “this was something they were supposed to do” (752). They cut branches and then go into the clubhouse, closing the lid on top and lighting the fire.

Ben is first to leave, overcome by the smoke. Eddie is next. After Beverly leaves, Bill notices the clubhouse expanding, and it's the size of a ballroom. Bill begins coughing and leaves Mike and Richie in the clubhouse. Richie realizes that he is now breathing easier. Mike notices that the room is continuing to grow.

Suddenly, Richie sees that the two of them are outside in the Barrens: “The foliage was deeper, lusher, savagely fragrant” (764). There are no buildings. The Standpipe is gone. Huge bats fly by and Mike shouts: “This is ago, Richie! Ago!” (766). It is the Barrens, thousands of years ago at least. Mike begins to hear a noise that grows, vibrating their bodies and the ground itself. Richie looks up and realizes that “they were about to see the coming of It” (767). He sees lights in the sky and then there is an explosion as something hits the ground that knocks them down. All of the animals begin running as Mike and Richie scream: “It! It!” (768).

Mike and Richie wake outside of the clubhouse. The others pulled them out when they were screaming. Mike tells them that “It came out of the sky. I never want to see anything like that again in my whole life” (772). Richie says that “It came from outside… I got that feeling. From outside of everything” (772). Mike say It has been there since the beginning of time.

When Richie finishes, Eddie feels pain in his left arm. He remembers that Henry Bowers broke his arm the day before Patrick Hockstetter disappeared. He spent the rest of the summer with his arm in a cast. He tells them about a day when Mr. Keene asked to speak to him.

Keene tells Eddie as a child that “[t]his has gone on long enough” (780). He explains to Eddie what a placebo is and says that his aspirator is a placebo: “Most of your trouble comes from being so tight and stiff all the time” (782). He says that most sickness begins in the mind. He tells Eddie that his aspirator “works on your chest because it works on your head” (786). Then he encourages Eddie to talk to his friends about what he has said.

Later Eddie comes out of a market and sees Henry with Victor and Belch. Patrick Hockstetter is with them as well. Eddie thinks Patrick is “a genuinely spooky kid” (791). He kills flies in school and keeps them in his pencil box. Henry throws Eddie down and rubs gravel in his face. A shopkeeper comes out and tells Henry to stop. Henry shoves him and tells him to get inside. The shopkeeper obeys but says he is calling the cops. Eddie jumps up and runs. Henry catches him and breaks his arm, to which Eddie proclaims: “Your father’s crazy and so are you” (795). Patrick spits on him and the bullies leave. Eddie laughs. Later he tells the others: “I think it was the first real pain I ever felt in my life. It didn’t put an end to me as a person. I think it gave me a basis for comparison, finding out you could still exist inside the pain, in spite of the pain” (797).

Eddie passes out. Mr. Nell takes him to the hospital. When he wakes, his mother is there. She pesters the doctor as he tries to set Eddie’s arm, and Eddie sees that she has exhausted the doctor and the nurses. He then believes everything Mr. Keene told him. When he sleeps, he dreams that his friends visit him in the hospital. Pennywise is in the waiting room. He rushes at Eddie and his face turns into the face of Eddie’s mother.

His mother had actually confronted his friends on the hospital’s porch, knowing that they would try to visit. She sends them away then visits Eddie. When she goes into Eddie’s room, he stares at her without affection. He accuses her of sending his friends away. She says it is for his own good, to which he retorts: “You’re not going to steal my friends just because you’re scared of being alone” (807). She starts to cry, but Eddie says she is making herself cry manipulatively. She says that they are “bad friends. Not our sort” (809). Eddie tells her about his discussion with Mr. Keene and about the placebo. He accuses her of knowing all along, but she denies it and plans on confronting Keene.

Before she leaves, Eddie asks her for a hug. After she is gone, Eddie thinks: “No turning around. No one goes home until we get to the end” (813). His friends visit the next day, and Bill says they are planning to make silver ball bearings to use with the Bullseye slingshot. That day they practiced, and Beverly was by far the best shot. They each sign Eddie cast.

Beverly tells them that she saw It take Patrick Hockstetter. She says he used to touch all of the girls. When they would look at him, he would smile and show them the flies in his pencil box.

The day Patrick dies, Beverly is practicing with the Bullseye slingshot at the dump. She sees Henry, Belch, Victor, and Patrick there, lighting their farts with a lighter. She hides in a car. After Victor and Belch leave, Beverly hears Patrick tell Henry to let him show him something that will feel good. When she looks, Patrick is masturbating Henry. When he asks Henry if he wants oral sex, Henry hits him and tells him that he’ll kill him if he tells anyone what they are doing. He says that if Patrick tells, then he will tell everyone what Patrick does “with the refrigerator” (834). Henry leaves. Patrick walks by the car where Beverly is hiding and goes to a refrigerator.

A brief history of Patrick’s craziness is provided. He had believed he was the only real creature in the world. When he was 12, he smothered his baby brother Avery to death: “He felt no guilt, had no bad dreams” (840). He does know that he would be in trouble if he were caught. He then began killing flies. When the excitement of the dead flies diminished, he began taking dogs and cats and putting them in the refrigerator at the dump to see how long it would take them to die. Eventually he starts to suspect that someone knows what he is doing. He dreams of two giant eyes looking at him from the refrigerator.

The day Henry tells him he knows, Patrick has a pigeon in the refrigerator. When he opens it, he sees the pigeon’s skeleton and “dozens of flesh-colored objects that looked like big macaroni shells” (844). One of them sprouts wings and flies at him, clamping on his arm and sucking his blood like a flying leech. The others begin to fly. Patrick is almost unconscious from blood loss when he sees a humanoid figure approach. It takes him by the arm and drags him. Later, Patrick wakes up in the dark and “It began to feed” (846).

Beverly watches Patrick thrash and scream but isn’t sure what she is seeing. One of the leeches bites her arm. She pulls it off, then shoots another with the Bullseye. She follows a trail of blood and finds Patrick’s wallet, then each of his sneakers. The trail ends at one of the concrete cylinders. Something is laughing at the bottom of the tube.

Four hours later, she returns with the others. When they open the refrigerator, there is a note on the door, written in blood: “Stop now before I kill you all. A word to the wise from your friend Pennywise” (851). Bill screams that Pennywise killed his brother and challenges him to come out and fight, saying that he’s going to kill him.

In the library, Ben shows them the scar Henry carved into him. He says it wasn’t there until Mike called him on the phone. Then Ben tells them his memory of making the silver ball bearings.

Ben makes them with bearing molds in the workshop of Bill’s dad: “The day that the Losers’ Club finally met It in face-to-face combat, the day It almost had Ben Hanscom’s guts for garters, was July 25th, 1958” (866). They go to 29 Neibolt Street. They crawl under the porch and into the cellar. After going up the stairs they are in the kitchen. There is a litter of rats in one of the cupboards.

Ben understands that “this house was a special place, a kind of station, one of the places in Derry, perhaps, in which It was able to find Its way into the overworld. This stinking rotted house where everything was somehow wrong” (874). He feels like the angles are shifting, trying to cut off their view of one another. He hurries and rejoins the others, who have gotten ahead of him. Mike senses that It is nearby, and that It is scared. In a bathroom they find an exploded toilet. Bill thinks that It escaped from them down the tubes. It bursts out of the tube and takes the form of the werewolf. Beverly fires at it with the Bullseye and misses. It throws Ben into a bathtub and is about to slash him with claws when Beverly shoots it in the face. It dives back down the tube and vanishes.

Outside, Ben checks himself. He has scratches on his stomach but is otherwise unharmed. They go to the clubhouse. Bill tells them that it is not over: “It’ll want us more than ever now” (889). He thinks that It will be in a new shape next time, one invulnerable to silver.