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Part 3, Chapter 11, Section 1 Summary: “Ben Hanscom Makes a Withdrawal”

Ben stands in front of a hardware store, thinking “kids were better at almost dying, and they were also better at incorporating the inexplicable into their lives. They believed implicitly in the invisible world” (542). As he walks up the street, he thinks: “What did we do with the silver dollar?” (542). He can’t remember, but he thinks Beverly saved his life with it. A word comes back to him: “Chüd” (543), but he doesn’t know what it means.

Ben goes to the library. He goes into the children’s section, where a “Story Time” is in progress. The librarian is reading the Three Billy Goat’s Gruff. At the circulation desk, he asks the librarian if he can get a library card for sentimental reasons, even though he lives in Nebraska. As they talk, he hears a voice yell: “Ben Hanscom killed the children! Get him! Grab him!” (550). He looks up and sees Pennywise the clown at the top of the stairs. Pennywise tells him to get out of town before nightfall because that is when he’ll start hunting them.

Pennywise turns into a rotting vampire. It begins chewing Its own lips off and blood pours from its mouth. It asks Ben if he wants to see what Eddie saw before he died. Ben hears himself say: “We made slugs out of it, of course. We made the silver dollars into slugs” (553). When he looks at the stairs again, Pennywise is gone. A balloon is tied to the railing, with the words: “HAVE A GOOD DAY! TONIGHT YOU DIE!” (554).

Part 3, Chapter 11, Section 2 Summary: “Eddie Kaspbrak Makes a Catch”

Eddie goes to a baseball field where Stanley had played sometimes. It has grown over with weeds and is no longer in use. He remembers that the enormous Belch Huggins was the only kid he had witnessed hitting a home run. Belch had died that summer in 1958. He goes to a chain-link fence and looks down to where the Barrens begin: “I spent the happiest times of my childhood down there in that mess” (565).

He sees a cement cylinder with a concrete lid and remembers that Ben had called them Morlock holes. He remembers that they had gone into one of the holes, and also that a boy named Patrick Hockstetter had been there. A baseball bounces over the fence and a voice invites him to come play. He sees a rotting Belch Huggins crawling up the embankment in a Yankees uniform. He looks like the leper. Eddie runs onto the baseball field and corpses began appearing around him, telling him how they died. He escapes and faints blocks away.

Part 3, Chapter 11, Section 3 Summary: “Bev Rogan Pays a Call”

Bev remembers the poem she received on a postcard. She had hidden it in a drawer, worried that her father would beat her if he found it and thought she was messing around with boys. She hears him saying: “I worry a lot about you Beverly. I worry an awful lot” (569). She wonders if he is still alive and living in Derry. She thinks about how much she had been in love with Bill and knows that it was because he had projected a sense of authority, even as a kid.

Soon she is in front of her apartment house. She rings the bell on her old door. A tall woman in her 70s opens the door. She tells Beverly that her father had died five years earlier and invites her in, introducing herself as Mrs. Kersh. She goes into the bathroom while Mrs. Kersh makes tea. Beverly remembers the blood.

Downstairs, when Mrs. Kersh pours the tea, it is dark and thick. She doesn’t want to drink it. She notices that Mrs. Kersh, while beautiful, has long, sharp, yellow teeth. Her dress turns black, and so do her teeth, becoming a witch. She begins to shrink as Beverly watches. The table turns to fudge, and the witch takes a bite of it. She screams that she is going to put Beverly and her friends in an oven. Beverly runs to the door and tries the knob. Her father’s voice says he worries about her a lot, and Beverly turns to see him wearing the witch’s dress. He says he only beat her because he wanted her sexually. Suddenly he is wearing a clown suit and holding a child’s severed leg.

The door opens and she gets outside: “We can’t beat It. Whatever It is, we can’t beat It. It even wants us to try—It wants to settle the old score” (582). She thinks they should just leave.

Part 3, Chapter 11, Section 4 Summary: “Richie Tozier Makes Tracks”

Richie is on a bench at the City Center. He wonders if the fortune cookies had been a group hallucination. He thinks about being funny as a kid, and that it was his way of dealing with a hyper mind that seemed to work faster than everyone else’s: “In the end he had outgrown the nightmares that were on the other side of all those laughs. Or he thought he had. Until today, when the word grownup suddenly stopped making sense to his own ears” (584).

He looks up at a huge statue of Paul Bunyan. He remembers being chased by Henry and his friends and hiding in the toy store nearby. He had sneaked out of the toy store and come to City Center to sit on the same bench. He had always assumed that what had happened next had been a dream. The statue of Paul Bunyan had leaned down and looked at him. Its eyes had been bloodshot: “I’m going to eat you up” (592) it had said. It had swung its axe and cut the bench in half when Richie dodged. Then the statue had reverted to a mere statue and Richie had forgotten about it until now.

A sharp pain stings his eyes. He remembers a movie called The Crawling Eye, which is the only movie that scared him as a kid. He had dreamed about it for weeks. On the marquee in front of City Center, he notices that it has his name on it. He is scheduled to perform with Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, and other dead celebrities. The bottom line reds: “WELCOME HOME RICHIE! YOU’RE DEAD TOO!” (597).

The Paul Bunyan statue changes to a twenty-foot-tall Pennywise: “This is going to be too much fun” (598) It says. The pain comes back to Richie’s eyes and he screams. He begins doing an impression of a voice he does not recognize, mocking the clown. He thinks he sees it recoil and then Richie runs. He hears Pennywise yelling that there is an eye waiting for him in the sewers. Blocks away, Richie drops to his knees as the pain in his eyes worsens.

Part 3, Chapter 11, Section 5 Summary: “Bill Denbrough Sees a Ghost”

Bill had his own equally troubling experience: “Bill did not see Pennywise that afternoon—but he did see a ghost” (601). He goes to the drain where George died. He talks with a boy on the street who says he has heard voices from the drains. The boy says one of his friends saw a shark in the Canal. Bill tells him to stay away from the sewers, the Canal, the trainyard, and the Barrens.

Bill walks by a second-hand store and sees Silver, his bike, in the window. He starts to cry and then goes inside. As he approaches the cashier, he hears strange words: “He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts” (610). He doesn’t know where the words are coming from, or what they mean. He buys Silver for $20 and pushes the bike out onto the street. He begins walking towards Mike’s house, where he will store Silver.

Part 3, Chapter 11, Section 6 Summary: “Mike Hanlon Makes a Connection”

Mike and Bill work on Silver. Mike had the urge to buy a tire-patching kit the week before, despite not having a bike. Mike hands him a pack of Bicycle playing cards—the same brand Bill used to put in Silver’s spokes to make a flapping noise when he pedaled. Mike drops the cards. When he picks them up, he notices that there are two aces of spades, which should be impossible.

Bill tells Mike about the sentence he keeps hearing in his head. Mike says it is a famous tongue twister exercise Bill repeated constantly when he was working on his stutter. He says that he never heard Bill say it all successfully. Bill says he did it once but can’t remember when. 

On the day Mike Hanlon calls the others, Henry Bowers begins to hear voices that he thinks are coming from the moon. Victor’s voice and Belch’s voice tell him that the kids are coming back to Derry. They say that Henry is the only one left and he has to pay them back.

Henry is an inmate at Juniper Hill, an “institution for the mentally insane” (621) on the outskirts of Augusta. In 1958 Henry was convicted of killing his father, which led him to Juniper Hill. He had also been convicted of killing most of the children in the summer of the murders. Henry had confessed to everything: “After the horror in the sewers, he didn’t seem to mind about anything” (622). He hears all of the voices of the Losers’ Club, whispering that they got the best of him. The moon changes to the face of a clown, and the clown says he has to go back to Derry and kill them all.

At two o'clock in the morning, Henry hears a voice under his bed. It is Victor, even though he is dead. Henry had watched the Frankenstein monster pull Victor’s head off. Victor says Henry needs to get out, return to Derry, and pay them back. He says that he could do it himself, but they only “half-believe” (628) in him. It won’t matter if they believe in Henry or not, because Henry is alive. Another inmate begins screaming, and a guard named Koontz comes in. Koontz sees Victor, but Victor has changed into a monster with a clown suit and the head of a Doberman, the only animal that Koontz is afraid of.

A woman named Kay hears a knock on her door. Kay is Beverly’s best friend and had always encouraged her to leave Tom. When she opens the door, it is Tom. He punches her. He beats her and threatens to kill her until she tells him that Beverly has gone to Derry. Tom sees one of Bill’s novels on Kay’s dresser. He believes that Beverly went to Derry to see Bill.

After Tom leaves, Kay calls an operator and asks for the name and number of every hotel in Derry. She finds that Beverly is registered at the Derry Town House and leaves a message asking Beverly to call her.

On an airplane, Tom reads the afterword to Bill’s novel. It says he is married to the actress Audra Phillips, and Tom knows who she is. She resembles Beverly. When he lands, he rents a car and begins driving to Derry, planning what he will do to Beverly and Bill.

Audra is on a plane to the United States. She tells her boss Freddie that Bill has had a nervous breakdown and she has to go to him. She rents a car after landing and signs an autograph for the girl behind the counter. As she drives towards Derry, “she realized she was more frightened than she had ever been in her life” (646). By that evening she is asleep in a hotel that happens to be next to the hotel where Tom is staying. Meanwhile, Henry hides during the next day, then hitchhikes towards Derry when it is dark.