The Demiseer Saga 1: Limitation

Discovery

A Note:

de·mise [di-mahyz] – noun

1. death or decease.

2. termination of existence or operation; ex: the demise of the empire.

se·er [see-er] – noun

1. a person who prophesies future events; prophet.

2. a person who is reputed to have special powers of divination, as a crystal gazer or palmist.

de·mi·se·er [di-mahyz-ee-er] - noun

1. a person who prophesies future demises.

2. a person who is reputed to have special powers regarding visions of death.

3. Madeleine Morgan.

I’d like to begin by saying those immortal words, ‘It all started when...,’ but I honestly don’t know when it started.  If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say it started when I was born.  But that’s like saying I started breathing when I was born, started blinking, started living.  To me, it’s so natural that it didn’t really have a beginning.

My first real memory, fuzzy as it may be, was waking up from what the family doctor called a night terror.  Night terrors and nightmares are related in that the mind visualizes awful scenarios; sometimes scary, sometimes sad.  The similarities end there, though.  It’s like a bad dream that I can’t wake from right away.  It's a nightmarish vision that terrifies me, and has actual physical symptoms of that terror.  I often wake up screaming, crying, sweating.  Even when I'm fully awake, aware that it was all a dream, it's difficult to shake those feelings. 

As the story goes, my parents awoke to my bloodcurdling screams when I was only six.  It took a couple of minutes, but they finally managed to wake me.  I supposedly sobbed and cried while telling them that I’d seen them both die.

I can’t remember what exactly happened in that dream.  I was too young to think to write it down in a dream journal, like I do now.  I asked Mom, much later on, what I’d told them that night.  She couldn’t remember; why would she?  She didn’t think it was anything other than a terrified child’s nightmare.  Nothing to worry about, and more likely something she'd have preferred to forget.

I don’t blame her.  It sounds pretty normal, I guess.  What kid doesn’t have nightmares?  Except that wasn’t the last time it happened.

When I started school, I had more of the night terrors – each one about a different person that I somehow knew.  One night it would be the little girl who I shared my Crayola box with that day, and the next it might be my nice new teacher.  I didn’t really understand it, but I just knew in my mind that the person I saw die was familiar.  Each death different.  Realistic.  Some strange and awful, some natural and almost peaceful. 

The more it happened, the more concerned my parents became.  It led to questions for the doctor, talk of having me see a psychiatrist, worries about taking me out of school, thinking that it was stress.  Seriously.  A stressed-out kindergartner.  It only took a few times for me to learn to keep my mouth shut.

I didn’t really get what was going on.  I just knew that every single time I told my parents about my nightmares, they gave one another that worried look.  There were hushed conversations, awkward dinners, more trips to the doctor.  So I began lying, and it was like instant gratification!  The first time they woke me from a nightmare and I told them I dreamed about a scary clown instead of a death, they exchanged a look of relief instead.  

It wasn’t until I was twelve that it all clicked in my head.  Even then, I was a bit skeptical.

My parents and I went to Tennessee to visit my paternal grandparents one Thanksgiving.  I'd only ever met them when I was much younger, and knowing Memaw and Poppi held the same vague sort of memories that walked a fine line between memory and faded photographs.  Like stories you’d heard so many times that you began to wonder if you were there or not. 

I spent the first real bit of time with them that I could recall.  I learned that Poppi and dad were almost identical in the way they spoke and acted, which was so fascinating because they were constantly at odds with one another.  I learned that Memaw had taken to my mother immediately despite my mother's nervousness at meeting her.  Little mannerisms that we shared, or the way both Poppi and I asked for jelly with our toast at breakfast instead of jam, or that Memaw's favorite song was an old Patsy Cline tune.  There seemed to be a million other tiny things that I tucked back into my memory and I truly began to feel closer to the grandparents that I obviously saw so little of.

Our second night in Tennessee, I had another night terror.

 I’d continued having them, repeatedly, but I grown and learned how to cope on my own.  Part of it was fear of being put into the loony bin or having to take medication.  Or worse, seeing a therapist.  So I just kept my dreams to myself and wrote them down when I felt like they would become fuzzy later.  I rarely woke myself up by screaming after a few years, too.  Maybe it was a bad sign; perhaps I'd become desensitized to all of the death I witnessed.  However, that night?  That night was another night terror that shook me to my core.   

I’d seen my grandmother die.