Some Things Last Forever (standard:Ghost stories, 3721 words)
Author: Gavin J. Carr	Added: Mar 16 2005	Views/Reads: 3732/2329	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Some things never fade. Some things never die. Some things last forever.

Some things - they last forever. 

A lot of folks, when I would tell them that, would nod their heads
politely and then go on to laugh behind my back - thinking I'd gone 
senile or was just a plain fool.  Other folks - those with a bit more 
honesty; the kind of no nonsense folks I grew up around and are thin on 
the ground nowadays - why, they'd just go ahead and disagree with me.  
And that's okay.  Who could blame them?  I'm an old-man now, and 
old-men get stuck in their ways; seem married to their opinions. 

The real truth of the matter is I watch them - these young ones.  They
have their flat pack furniture and their disposable diapers.  They buy 
fast-food lunches they eat half of then throw away; they even have 
plastic razors that they use once and then toss in the trash.  It's a 
world where nothing lasts a month let alone forever, except maybe the 
Styrofoam from their lunch and the plastic from their razors.  No, to 
them, nothing lasts, and you've got to grab what you can before it gets 
away. 

But I know different.  Some things they last forever, and you might move
on and even forget, but when you come back, though you might have 
changed, you see the truth. 

Some things - they last forever... 

We were both twelve, Tom and me.  Too old really to be pulling the caper
we had planned.  But twelve is a strange age, an age of transition, and 
I guess we both figured this would be the last chance either one of us 
would have to do something childish, and still get away with it. 

Tom and me grew up together.  We lived in the same street - me with my
parents and two sisters - Tom, with just his Mom in a small apartment 
by the railway track.   I don't know what happened to Tom's Dad, I 
never asked.  That probably seems strange to you - Tom and me being 
best friends and all.  But whenever I visited Tom's apartment, I'd see 
the old wedding photograph in its gild frame - his Mom smiling, in 
lace, and his Dad in his army uniform, and I wouldn't have to ask - 
there were plenty of Dads that hadn't come back. 

One day, when I was about four, Tom just appeared at my door and asked
if I wanted to come out to play.  No introductions, no getting to know 
you, no messing around of any kind - just, “do you want to come and 
play?”  And I did, because, well, I guess because I could.  That's what 
kids do, they make friends and they play.  But I also think it was 
because it was Tom.  The kid was something special and you could see it 
even then. 

The summer it happened we were on a horror kick.  It had been my
birthday a couple of months before and I had been give a fine, leather 
bound book by Mom's sister, who I guess thought it was time I read 
something a bit better than the funny papers and those old 
pulp-magazines Dad left lying around his workshop.  But like most 
twelve-year-old kids I had ideas of my own.  What I really wanted was a 
set of barbells, so I could build myself up and give Ralf Dugan and the 
rest of those bullies at school the beating they deserved.  I was 
pretty disappointed and so the book lay in my room, unopened, for 
around a month before Tom spied it. 

“Jeez, Bobbie.  You know what you got here?” he asked, those brown eyes
of his lighting up with wonder.  “It's one of the good ones - Dracula.” 


Of course I'd heard of it. “They showed the movie at the Rialto and it
was supposed to be pretty hot-stuff.  I heard Linda Mullroy's Mom 
fainted and had to get carried out on a stretcher.” 

He looked at me incredulously and shook his head, “Linda Mullroy's Mom
is a doofus,” he said.  “Besides, the book is always better than the 
film - it's a known fact.” 

I nodded in agreement at this profound truth, though at the time I could
have counted on the fingers of one hand the amount of books I had read. 
Tom was the reader; the smart one; the one who was going places. 

We made it a regular thing, that summer.  Each night we would meet at my


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