Three episodes into IT: Welcome to Derry, and Andy Muschietti‘s deeper dive into Stephen King‘s world has already been filled with scares, unexpected deaths, surprising twists, and plenty of callbacks and easter eggs. In the last episode, “Now You See It,” the kids finally caught a glimpse of a clown while Pennywise spoke from the darkness to none other than The Shining‘s Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk). With the entity’s most familiar form of the killer clown getting closer, what does Episode 4, “The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet’s Function,” have in store for the residents of Derry?

Leroy Hanlon Saves Will From the Entity in ‘IT: Welcome to Derry’ Episode 4

The kids are riding their bikes through the downtown streets and straight to the police department, where they put the photos they’ve developed on Chief Bowers’ (Peter Outerbridge) desk. They tell him what happened, so he takes a look and shows it to two officers, but there’s nothing much to see. The ghostly dead kids are nowhere to be seen in the photos, and while they can see the clown in one image, they insist it must be a statue.

In gym class later, the new friends realize that the entity could have ended their lives, but chose to mess with them instead. They decide no one will believe them, but Lilly (Clara Stack) does have one adult she trusts: Ingrid (Madeline Stowe), the nurse from Juniper Hill who doesn’t judge her at all. She remembers kids disappearing in the 1930s, but they were probably just runaways, nothing like what Lilly’s describing. Still, she doesn’t want Lilly to stop trying to find out what’s going on, because, as she says, the girl can do anything with good friends by her side.

Meanwhile, Rose (Kimberly Guerrero) and Taniel (Joshua Odjick) show up at the Hanlon home to drop off some of the items Charlotte (Taylour Paige) bought at Rose’s thrift shop. The two women talk over coffee, and Rose asks if Leroy (Jovan Adepo) is working on the pipeline General Shaw (James Remar) told her about. This confuses Charlotte, who insists her husband is a pilot who’s doing something top secret. When she asks whether she needs to be concerned about the missing kids, Rose says bad things happen in Derry from time to time, so Charlotte should keep the people she loves close. When Will (Blake Cameron James) gets home from school later and ultimately breaks down, insisting that something is coming after him, Charlotte hugs her son tight and tells him there’s no more going outside except to go to school until she finds out what’s going on.

At dinner, Leroy asks Will about his first week of school, but he doesn’t have much to say and asks to be excused. Charlotte doesn’t divulge what their son revealed to her, but she asks Leroy to do something with Will, so the two go fishing in that weekend. Will is bored, but he does catch a fish before it gets away. When the line breaks, Leroy goes to the car for more lures, leaving Will alone in the knee-deep water. This is a mistake, because the entity strikes, taking the form of a burned Leroy and pulling Will under the water. Thankfully, Leroy hears his son’s screams and rushes to him just in time to save him from drowning. He doesn’t see what happened, but does discover bloody scratches on Will’s arm. Then, both father and son see a red balloon floating across the river.

Things Get Even Worse for Lilly in ‘IT: Welcome to Derry’ Episode 4

Charlotte visits Chief Bowers, where she points out that if someone is chasing kids in the cemetery, the police may have the wrong man in jail. She’s denied when she asks to speak to Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider), so she goes to his home and talks to his mother and Ronnie (Amanda Christine) about wanting to help. At the same time, Hallorann and his fellow Black soldiers are cleaning up their new hangout when he’s hit by a flash of pain in his head. He sees his mother in the woods, telling him to watch himself and “keep [his] lid on tight.” The next second, she’s not there, but that’s also Hanlon shows up to tell Hallorann what happened at the river. He demands to know what they’re looking for in Derry, but Halloran doesn’t know — and he isn’t sure he wants to.

At the standpipe, Will tells his friends about the river and how the entity showed him his fears. He wonders if the creature is like an animal, feeding on their fear before eating them. Their conversation leads to Lilly stealing her mom’s anti-anxiety pills and giving them to everyone so they can take one if anything scary happens. She might need them for something else, though, because even though Marge (Matilda Lawler) apologizes to Lilly at school for being so mean, a glance at the leader of the popular girls shows that something sinister is being planned.

Meanwhile, Charlotte returns to the police station with written permission from Hank’s mother to speak to her son. She’s refused again, but after threatening to call in a bus full of freedom riders, the cop on duty backs down. Charlotte tells Hank to file prejudicial treatment papers so he can skip bail and remain on house arrest until trial. He might have to go to Shawshank for a few days, but he’ll finally be at home. At some point, though, he’ll have to go on record with the truth. Hank finally reveals the reason he’s been keeping his mouth shut about his real whereabouts: he was spending time with a married white woman that night, and he doesn’t want the consequences to come down on either her or himself.

At lunch, Marge insists she wants to start over and tells Lilly she should say hi to the cute boy who noticed her. Excited, Lilly goes to freshen up, while the other girls approach Marge and discuss their plan to embarrass her in front of the school. Feeling guilty, Marge goes to the bathroom to confess to her friend, but suddenly screams as her eyes bulge and pop out of her skull. Lilly immediately knows what’s happening and tries to grab her mom’s pill, but accidentally drops it down the toilet. In the chaos, Marge stumbles into an empty shop class, where she stabs her bulging eyes and then tries to chop them off with a table saw. Everyone runs in, but in the aftermath, it only looks like Lilly has been assaulting Marge herself, rather than trying to save her.

Hallorann Finds the Neibolt House in ‘IT: Welcome to Derry’ Episode 4

Image via Warner Bros. Television

Will is in bed, thinking about what happened in the river and unable to sleep, so he looks through his telescope and sees a silhouette of a clown behind a tree in the front yard. He screams, and his dad runs outside, demanding the person show themselves, but no one is there — just another red balloon up in the tree. The next morning, Hanlon marches into Shaw’s office and demands to know what the general has them chasing. Shaw takes him to an interrogation room window where the two watch Hallorann with Taniel. He apologizes, then puts two fingers to his forehead before the teen screams in pain. Hallorann is in Taniel’s memories now, witnessing a moment between his younger self and his Aunt Rose. She brings up their people’s story of the monster in the woods and how it’s actually real, and asks Taniel to tell it back to her so she knows he has the truth straight.

Millions of years ago, Taniel recounts, an evil spirit fell to earth in a fallen star, and the spirit was set free. The star it came from was used to create a weapon, a dagger to fight the monster. When settlers arrived and didn’t listen to locals’ warnings to stay out of the woods, the entity killed them. It fed on them, growing stronger and more powerful until it could hunt outside the woods. A single dagger could no longer protect the village. One member of the tribe, a young girl, refused to leave and took the dagger into the woods to gather more pieces of the sacred star to fashion into weapons. A search party, led by the girl’s mother was formed when she and others were discovered missing, but when they went into the woods without protection, the entity appeared as the things they feared the most, killing them all. Refusing to relent, the girl led another group into the woods to break off shards of the ancient star, and formed a different plan — not to kill the monster but to cage it, by burying 13 secret shards in a circle around the woods.

In the memory, Aunt Rose freezes, and Hallorann appears in front of young Taniel, asking him how to find the shards. The older Taniel tells him to follow the tunnels under the old well — and the episode ends with a reveal of the old, dilapidated Neibolt house.