The Confrontation at 29 Neibolt Street

On July 25th, 1958, the seven members of the Losers' Club gathered on the balding lawn of 29 Neibolt Street, a decaying saltbox house that had become one of the creature's access points between the sewers and the surface. Bill Denbrough carried his father's Walther PPK pistol, but the plan had shifted: instead of bullets, Ben Hanscom had melted one of his father's silver dollars and cast two small silver slugs, and Beverly Marsh, who had proven the best shot with Bill's Bullseye slingshot, would fire them. The others carried nothing but their courage and the belief that silver could stop a monster.

Entering the House

They crawled under the porch and through the broken cellar window, the same window through which Eddie had seen the leper weeks before. Ben got stuck in the window frame and had to be pulled through, his embarrassment acute in front of Beverly. The cellar was dim and smelled of sour decay. They moved through the kitchen, where a rat tumbled from a cupboard and nearly made Beverly waste a slug, and into a parlor that seemed impossibly large, the angles wrong, the perspective crazed. The house itself was a glamour, a false face that tried to separate them. When Stan began to panic, crying that he had nothing to fight with, Bill tore Stan's bird book from his pocket and forced him to remember his own weapon: the names of birds, which had driven off the dead boys in the Standpipe.

The Bathroom and the Drain

They reached a bathroom at the end of the hall. The toilet had exploded, its porcelain shards scattered everywhere, and from the open drainpipe came the steady thrum of pumping machinery. Bill leaned over the hole and heard it: the sound of the pumps in the Barrens, but also something alive. Ben saw eyes take shape in the darkness below, and a fetid smell belched from the pipe. "It's coming!" he screamed. Beverly raised the Bullseye. The creature exploded out of the drain, a shifting mass of silver and orange that locked into the shape of the Teenage Werewolf—the monster from the movie Richie, Ben, and Beverly had seen at the Aladdin Theater.

The Fight

The Werewolf lunged at Bill, its green eyes blazing, its claws ripping through the wallpaper. Beverly fired the first silver slug, but it missed, punching a hole above the tub. Ben stepped in front of her to protect her as she fumbled for the second slug, and the Werewolf seized him, its claws tearing a long gash down his torso from chest to belly. Blood gushed out, and Ben was thrown into the bathtub. The creature turned back toward Bill, and Beverly, her fear suddenly replaced by a cold, hunter's clarity, drew the sling back. She fired the second slug, and it struck the Werewolf high in the snout, punching a perfect round hole. The creature screamed—a sound of surprise, pain, fear, and rage—and blood gouted from the wound in a high-pressure torrent. It turned and dived back into the drainpipe, its shape melting and running as it went, and the house snapped back to its normal size, the magic withdrawn.

Aftermath

The Losers stood in the ruined bathroom, bleeding and shaking. Ben's wound was long but not mortal. Beverly's blouse had lost all its buttons, and Bill gave her his tee-shirt. They signed Eddie's cast—a contract, a bond—and retreated to the clubhouse in the Barrens. The silver slugs had worked because the seven of them believed they would, but they had not killed It. The creature would return in a new shape, one over which silver held no power. Ben, lying awake that night, began to understand the deeper question: where did the power of the silver come from? It was not the metal itself, but their shared belief. And that belief, he sensed, was the only weapon that could truly destroy the thing under Derry.