Dudley

I was a very young child, maybe two, maybe three at the oldest, so my memory is kinda foggy on some parts, and it actually took my mother to remind me of what happened the day of the incident.
My mother and I were living with one of her friend’s friends who had a house and a couple of open rooms she was renting out. We lived there for a while, before I found an imaginary friend, named Dudley.
He was about the same age (maybe a year older) and had curly red hair. He wore clothes right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. We had fun playing every day, but whenever my mom would come by, he would hide. After a while, I asked him why he always hid and his reply was well thought out like he expected me to ask it.
“Your mom wouldn’t like me,” he said, “she wouldn’t let us have fun and play anymore. You don’t want me to go away forever do you?”
Of course I didn’t, I was a lonely kid with no friends who was constantly moving around. So I told him no, and he continued to hide whenever my mom came around. It was like he was my little secret.
Well, time went by and we were getting together just fine, it was a nice sunny day out and Dudley wanted to teach me a game. He told me to grab a magnifying glass and meet him in the field next to the house. So, me being the young unquestioning child, I was, I did exactly as he told me.
“Hold the glass about here,” he said pointing about my belly button at the time’s height. “Look at the cool light coming off of it. Wait for the smoke, the smoke is what you want.”
After this, I personally have no memory of anything, except for crying. But my mother says she could smell the smoke inside of the house and ran outside and saw it in the field and heard me crying.
She grabbed a hose and put out the tiny fire before it got any bigger. She found the magnifying glass and asked me if I knew what I was doing, and I told her it was Dudley’s idea.
“You mean the red headed boy you play with outside every once in a while?” she asked.
“He told me he couldn’t be seen by anybody else… That I was his only friend, and that you wouldn’t like him.”
“Alright, let’s go inside. It’s all okay now, just come in for a bath.”
I never saw him again.
Years later, my mother asked me if I remember the fire I started. Immediately, I remembered his face and sheepishly said yes. She asked me if I still saw things like that or if I outgrew it.
“I don’t know, sometimes… Every once in a while I see or hear something…”
“Well I never did either, and I was able to see your imaginary friend a couple of times while you were out playing in the field behind Kirk’s house.”
This freaked me out a little, so I dropped the subject and put in my earbuds again and tuned everything out and dicked around on the internet.
I just came back from my mother’s funeral, and my roommate and I were just trying to clear my mind a little. We went to Wal-Mart and just walked around for a while and, somehow, we got on to the topic of imaginary friends. I relayed him the story of Dudley.
“Dude that’s fucked up… I wonder if he died as a kid near there or something...”
“You know… I don’t know…” I said, as I decided I’d do some research later when I got home.
As it turns out, sometime in the late 1800s, I forget the date or year at this time, a family of three died in their sleep as a fire burned down their house, their farm and a few hundred acres of empty land surrounding the property. A mother, father and a son all died in that fire. The boy's name you ask?
Dudley.
Category:Ghosts