by Rex Baron
Michael jarred Lexi sharply in her side with his elbow. She turned to face him in the darkness of the auto and saw his eyes shining with trust.
END OF BOOK THREE
Author Notes
Rex Baron
November 2019 - Fountain Hills, AZ
HEXE: A Séance... Opening a door to who knows what.
Greetings to all of you who want to explore the unseen world of magic. I’d like to thank you for reading HEXE and want to share some background on how the series came to be and some of the elements of research or personal experiences that have become a part of it.
Words from Beyond
If you’ve ever unfolded a Ouija board in front of a circle of friends with the intention of speaking to someone long departed, you know the excitement of potentially opening a door to the supernatural.
If you don’t know what a Ouija board is, it’s a board game, where you supposedly speak to people who are in the spirit world by putting your finger on a triangular shaped cursor that moves around the perimeter of the board, choosing letters to spell out words. The kicker of the exercise is that the cursor is said to be moved by the spirit... telling you something you need to know, or revealing to you some dark secret about themselves. At its best, the experience of sitting in a group with each person holding a finger on the cursor is an exercise in spewing out something from each of the participant’s subconscious mind. At its worst, it can make for an unquestionably spooky evening.
Ouija was a passion of mine as a kid, and I found no lack of participants amongst my cousins and friends. We were not much interested in speaking to anyone particular from the other side, like a recently passed relative or neighbor. Most of the time, we were happy to hook up with any passing spook that might be hanging around and felt that it expanded our chances to pull in someone famous or important if we didn’t insist on talking to anyone special. We each secretly hoped to conjure the spirit of some long gone movie star like James Dean or even a historical figure like Abraham Lincoln, to see if he had anything to tell us about his assassination that we didn’t already know from school. Most often, we conjured up one of the regulars like Marilyn Monroe or Walt Disney, and once in a while someone like the author Jane Austin, for one of my more literary girl friends. We would ask the hovering spirits all sorts of inane or naughty questions, as we giggled and made wisecracks during this “game” of scaring ourselves.
Then one day the unexplainable happened that made me sit up and take the “game” a lot more seriously. I was at my cousin Louise’s house with a band of cousins, partaking of our secret pleasure, when something strange happened. Five of us were sitting in a circle, each with their finger on the moving cursor, when the triangle started to move faster than it ever had before. Louise protested and demanded that we stop pushing, but each of us insisted that we weren’t.
When someone asked the name of the impetuous spirit... amidst giggling and jokes, the cursor sped around the board, spelling out the name Merriam. None of us had ever heard of anyone named Merriam, other than the compiler of the Merriam Webster dictionary, and we were amazed when the cursor continued to move, quickly spelling out a message for us. The plastic triangle moved so quickly back and forth across the board that, one by one, each of us was forced let go of it with our finger, and to our terrified amazement, it continued to lurch about, without being touched. It chose letters to spell out the message: THE WOODBURY ROAD... UNDER THE POST.
That was it... that’s all we got. After that, the board remained mute, and in spite of all our coaxing it refused to speak further. I could not help thinking, even then, that it made no sense, and if this was the opportunity of a “lifetime” for a spirit to tell you something important from beyond the grave, they had not expressed themselves very well. Of course, we immediately conjectured that’s where poor Merriam’s body must be buried, unquestionably a victim of sinister murder. But none of us knew of a Woodbury road in our town and “Under the post” could mean anything from a piece of wood driven into the ground... or in England, where we lived, it could mean that something was lying under the morning mail.
In spite of the vagueness of the message, we managed to whip ourselves up into a frenzy of excitement and cousin Louise chose to sleep in her sister’s room, that night, away from the scene of the “conjuring”. Years later, when I was traveling near Woodbury Connecticut, across the ocean from England, I found myself riding on a WOODBURY ROAD and I wondered whether our Merriam had come all that way, just to tell us where she was.
At the “Big Boy’s” table
By the time I was in my late teens, I had given up the Ouija board and had moved on to a seat at the high dollar table... namely a full on séance. Now you have to understand that get-togethers like this were common where I came from, and it wasn’t until I was in college in America, years later, and I mentioned spiritualism to my roomies, that I was suddenly aware that not everyone came home from church on Sunday, had a nice lunch, then popped over to the neighbor’s for a full blown séance.
The description of Lucy attending the séance in the first book of HEXE was taken largely from my experiences at such events. The setup is always the same. People are invited, or charged to attend, as a “trance medium” sits at the head of the table and serves as the “vessel or vehicle” through which the spirits of the disincarnate will speak. Once the medium is possessed by the chatty ghost, anxious to make contact, the table at which you sit may rock gently or the lights might flicker... just so you know they are there. At almost every séance I have ever attended, I would guess that the medium was a fake... moving the table with her knees or having an accomplice somewhere about to create the theatrical staging for the “Presence”.
Sometimes, however, something unusual does occur. Like Lucy in HEXE, I once had the experience, at a séance in New York City, of feeling as if I were falling backwards, like in a dream. As the Medium was babbling on about something, and we were sitting there in a circle of clenched hands, I felt light headed and saw the figure of a woman, wearing an evening dress from the early 1900s. She reached out her hand and spoke to me, but when I focused my mind and came back to the present, I couldn’t remember what she had said.
I have been to many such evenings since I came to America and find that it is a popular entertainment for many, who like a bit of spooky amusement. In fact, I met one of my best friends at a séance in Los Angeles a couple of decades ago. I was one of about two-dozen people who worked in the film business. We were seated on cushions around the perimeter of a large living room in the Hollywood Hills, all holding hands to create a safe circle. The host, a rather boastful guy, prompted the medium for flattering answers to his questions, and she was more than happy to please her host (and probably employer). After a while the Medium tried to convince those present, that we had all been servants or slaves to this man in a former lifetime and that we had been brought together on this occasion to honour him.
Suddenly from across the room, I saw a tall, good looking young woman break the circle and rise to her feet.
“Bullshit... I’m outta here,” she announced to the room, as she headed toward the door. In a flash I jumped up and left with her. Instead of celebrating our “master” as was intended for the evening, she and I went out for cocktails and we have been best friends ever since.
Like the evening at Mrs. Mulridge’s house in HEXE, most séances are meant as an amusement. But there are times when the supernatural actually rears its head. At those times the veil between the worlds becomes transparent and you can actually feel that there is more in heaven and earth than we can know... for real.
I want to thank you all again for reading HEXE and getting into the world of the unseen forces. I really appreciate your support and hope that you enjoy the continuing saga of remarkable women, locked in a test of power for the ultimate victory. And remember... NEVER step outside the pentagram... it’s your circle of safety.
S. M. I. B. R B
(So Mote It Be) Rex
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