Stephen King – Night Shift – Strawberry Spring
STRAWBERRY SPRING
Springheel Jack.
I saw those two words in the paper this morning and my God, how they take me back. All that was
eight years ago, almost to the day. Once, while it was going on, I saw myself on nationwide TV – the
Walter Cronkite Report. Just a hurrying face in the general background behind the reporter, but my
folks picked me out right away. They called long-distance. My dad wanted my analysis of the situation;
he was all bluff and hearty and man-to-man. My mother just wanted me to come home. But I didn’t
want to come home. I was enchanted.
Enchanted by that dark and mist-blown strawberry spring, and by the shadow of violent death that
walked through it on those nights eight years ago. The shadow of Springheel Jack.
In New England they call it a strawberry spring. No one knows why; it’s just a phrase the old-timers
use. They say it happens once every eight or ten years. What happened at New Sharon Teachers’
College that particular strawberry spring. . . there may be a cycle for that, too, but if anyone has figured
it out, they’ve never said.
At New Sharon, the strawberry spring began on 16 March 1968. The coldest winter in twenty years
broke on that day. It rained and you could smell the sea twenty miles west of the beaches. The snow,
which had been thirty-five inches deep in places, began to melt and the campus walks ran with slush.
The Winter Carnival snow sculptures, which had been kept sharp and clear-cut for two months by the
sub-zero temperatures, at last began to sag and slouch. The caricature of Lyndon Johnson in front of the
Tep fraternity house cried melted tears. The dove in front of Prashner Hall lost its frozen feathers and
its plywood skeleton showed sadly through in places.
And when night came the fog came with it, moving silent and white along the narrow college avenues
and thoroughfares. The pines on the wall poked through it like counting fingers and it drifted, slow as
cigarette smoke, under the little bridge down by the Civil War cannons. It made things seem out of
joint, strange, magical. The unwary traveller would step out of the juke-thumping, brightly lit
confusion of the Grinder, expecting the hard clear starriness of winter to clutch him . . . and instead he
would suddenly find himself in a silent, muffled world of white drifting fog, the only sound his own
footsteps and the soft drip of water from the ancient gutters. You half expected to see Gollum or Frodo
and Sam go hurrying past, or to turn and see that the Grinder was gone, vanished, replaced by a foggy
panorama of moors and yew trees and perhaps a Druid-circle or a sparkling fairy ring.
The jukebox played ‘Love Is Blue’ that year. It played ‘Hey, Jude’ endlessly, endlessly. It played
‘Scarborough Fair.
And at ten minutes after eleven on that night a junior named John Dancey on his way back to his
dormitory began screaming into the fog, dropping books on and between the sprawled legs of the dead
girl lying in a shadowy corner of the Animal Sciences parking lot, her throat cut from ear to ear but her
eyes open and almost seeming to sparkle as if she had just successfully pulled off the funniest joke of
her young life – Dancey, an education major and a speech minor, screamed and screamed and screamed.
The next day was overcast and sullen, and we went to classes with questions eager in our mouths – who?
why? when do you think they’ll get him? And always the final thrilled question: Did you know her?
Did you know her?
Yes, I had an art class with her.
Yes, one of my room-mate ‘s friends dated her last term.
Yes, she asked me for a light once in the Grinder. She was at the next table.
Yes, Yes, I
Yes. . . yes. . . oh yes, I
We all knew her. Her name was Gale Cerman (pronounced Kerr-man), and she was an art major. She