Stephen King's IT: What The Ending Really Means

5. Henry Bowers SEEMS To Be Dead

Curiously, It chooses not to simply lure mulleted maniac Henry Bowers to the sewers and kill him as he does with his sidekick Patrick - instead, he recognises a flash of evil in the kid, who is mentally abused by his overbearing cop father and decides to use him as a pawn.

First, he has him stab and kill his father and then instructs him to "kill them all" (we'll all just have to accept that this makes no sense when It wants to feed off the Losers, but there would be other victims so it's not entirely silly), which leads him to the house on Neibolt Street after the Losers Club.

There he fights Mike and almost kills him, but the latest addition to the Losers Club manages to subdue him and pushes him down the well, seemingly killing him. But then, you don't actually see a body and the fact that he returns in 1985 in the novel suggest he might well not have died.

In the original text, Henry actually escapes the sewer, where It kills his sidekicks but is driven mad and convicted for the murders of his father and It's victims. He is sent to an insane asylum but escapes in 1985 with It's help to try and kill the Losers again. With that important involvement, it seems inevitable that Henry didn't die, but instead merely went to the same place It went through the sub-sewer, to return in 27 years as an ally of the clown.