by Rex Baron
“You know as well as I do that I'm not exactly suited to this place.”
“That's hardly a reason to pack up and leave,” David answered abruptly.
“I'm sorry, but I just don't want to stay.”
“But if you leave now, you'll miss the premiere of Lucy's picture, and after all, that's why we came here in the first place.”
“You know perfectly well that I have no earthly function to perform here. I'm not being of any use. I'm not one of your actors or singers and will scarcely be missed.”
David rolled his eyes, an expression of exasperation that usually made Celia feel anxious, certain that she had displeased him, that she was being a fool and a bore. His little grimace had signaled all that and more for years. But somehow, at this moment, halfway up the hillside, she did not feel weak. She did not wither under the weight of his casual gesture.
For the first time, his face looked unattractive to her. In spite of the glamour of his tanned skin, he was old. He had crossed that line into a different world, irretrievably set on a path from which there was no turning back.
Celia shifted her attention to the young woman in the inappropriately drab dress, covered in horrid little indefinable flowers or animals. She watched the woman's eyes as they passed over David with disinterest. This young woman did not find him captivating, Celia thought with amazement. In spite of her cautious attention to their conversation, it was apparent to Celia that this woman had no designs on her husband. In fact, she found him of no interest whatever, other than half of a possibly exciting argument to be overheard in public.
She simply did not know who he was, Celia said to herself and realized that without the framework of fame, David was nothing more than a picture of graying severity, like an aging uncle or a strict schoolmaster, lined from years of disciplining the humor out of his headstrong pupils.
This woman was not in love with David. Celia said the words silently in her mind, almost stunned at the revelation.
The sunlight caught the hollow cavern of his cheek, reflecting the ruggedness of his chiseled bones. He was still handsome of course, but she knew now that it was only a matter of time, a few years perhaps, before his face stopped turning the heads of pretty women. He would always be admired, or remarked about as to how well he had aged, far more so than she had hoped for herself. But he would no longer be the beautiful man that all eyes adored. He would be hers alone, free from intruding young upstarts and simpering cosmeticized beauties, who offered nothing but unconvincing flattery to his ego in return for a grudgingly bestowed favour.
She felt terribly free, galvanized in her decision to return and save her marriage at whatever the price. Surely, she was not the first virtuous wife who had been forced to pay off the greedy appetite of an amorous adversary in order to save the profits of her own career in a faithful union.
David glowered at her, waiting for her stammer, her words lost in her anxiousness, to back away and leave him in the dim glow of a small daily triumph. But today she was, by far, the victor.
“Oh I know what you're thinking,” she heard herself laugh aloud with amazement. “I'm not expecting to be coaxed to stay, like some poor thing who needs a bit more attention. It's not that at all.”
“If that's the case, then I've done something to upset you,” David replied with annoyance.
Her mind raced to the telephone conversation, the pain that had lasted unabated as she lay staring endlessly at the flowers on the ceiling, and all through dinner and into a sleepless night. She thought of the small humiliations she had suffered over the years. How her glorious husband had fumbled under a theater seat for a lady’s glove, to return it, smiling and gallant, having too hastily planted a card requesting an assignation that poked obtrusively from under the lifeless cloth fingers. She remembered countless dinner parties where she dared not leave the table for fear of a complicated flirtation. She had been weak. She had truly been a fool. She had let herself become a fool by becoming his wife.
David had always held the power that talent and beauty could provide, but now it was different. She realized that hers had been only a waiting game, and time had, at long last, evened the score.
She smiled gratefully to the little sparrow of a woman across the aisle, who by her disregard for David, her resounding act of unconscious service to his wife, had insured the future for Celia as the one and only Mrs. David Montague.
“No, I'd be going in any event,” she said, patting his leg charitably.
The tram stopped on Mulholland Drive and an elderly man mounted the steps of the car, nodded to the momentarily silent passengers, and took a seat next to the woman in the brown dress. He rested his hands on his walking stick that he planted firmly between his dusty shoes.
To Celia, the strange, simple couple across the aisle were a mirror image of her and David, the unadorned out-picturing of what they would have become had it not been for their life of privilege and money. They sat facing one another, a Grant Wood painting of a farmer and his wife, dried by years of drought and lovelessness on one side, and on the other, their mirror image, hidden from view below a complicated veneer of power and couture and self-satisfaction. The similarity made Celia feel charitable toward the two strangers.
“Well, now we have enough for bridge,” she said brightly, startling the young woman into a nervous jerk forward and an uncomfortable little twist of a smile.
David eyed her cautiously, like an unarmed hunter, awakened abruptly in a forest of menacing sounds.
“But what about that infernal journal of yours. I thought you were so keen on finishing that.”
Celia sighed matter-of-factly.
“You know, secretly I had hoped to sell it to a lady's magazine. But as it is, I'm afraid I haven't the knack for it. The only parts that sound good are bits that I'm sure I read somewhere else. So you see, there is very little point in bothering at all.”
“I don't know why you find it necessary to do such things,” David said in a belittling tone. “Really darling, why would you even want to sell your little account of our private lives to strangers?”
“I thought it might be fun,” she said, wistfully, picking at the wicker seat with her finger.
“I can't hear you,” David hissed through his teeth. “You're muttering again. You know how it irritates me when you sulk.”
“I'm hardly sulking,” she answered evenly. “Honestly David, I think perhaps you ought to have your hearing checked. You seem to be having this problem of not hearing me more and more lately. I suppose we are aging just a bit though, aren't we?”
Again, she patted his leg. He pulled it away with an irritable grunt.
“In any event, I plan to leave in three days time, and attacking me for my poor little journal will hardly convince me to stay.”
“I hardly attacked you,” David snorted, turning back the inquisitive stare of the old man opposite with a glower of disdain.
“Ridicule then. I was writing so that I might feel a part of things. It's always your world, your latest protégé, your operas. What place is there in it for me?”
“You're my wife,” David replied.
“I'm not the one who needs reminding of that, am I?”
David watched her face, the lines of determination around the mouth, the sparkle of defiance in her eyes. He admired her for not collapsing under the weight of her emotions. It was her fear of losing him, her weakness of jealousy that fired the passions of his anger toward her. But now, she sat calmly and in control. She was still elegant, if not faithful to the image of beauty she had first shown him years before. He watched the sunlight fall through the window, across her shoulder, bisecting her strand of pearls into a perfect golden triangle and he realized that he still loved her after all.
END OF BOOK ONE
Author Notes
Rex Baron
September 2019 - Fountain Hills, AZ
HEXE: What does Hexe mean and who are they?
; I want to thank you for reading HEXE and 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.
HEXE is the title of the series about people who have developed exceptional gifts of personal power. These gifts might be included under the umbrella of all things supernatural that have to do with the use of a focused mind.
HEXE is a German word meaning a “wise one”... someone with knowledge of how plants may be used to heal or kill, how to interpret voices in the winds or the forest, and how to change the appearance of someone or something to elicit an immediate response of attraction. In short, the word HEXE describes not so much a spell, or what we think of as a HEX, but a person...someone who might unquestionably be called a witch.
Centuries ago the “wise ones” served as midwives, because they knew the properties of herbs that might induce labour or stop bleeding, relieve pain and cure any manner of mysterious illnesses, from tuberculosis, which was referred to as “wasting of the flesh” or hemorrhaging that was abated by a plaster of myrrh, a herb that we now appreciate as a powerful coagulant. The wise woman or man in a village might also prescribe a remedy for diabetes, the “thirsting disease”, that would transform the patient with stews made of vegetables, low in carbohydrates, followed by a litany of chants to keep the afflicted one believing in the cure.
I have been in the USA for many years and have lived in New England, New York and Los Angeles... some of the cities that one might associate with the supernatural and “witchy” behaviour. As a result, I have had experiences, like mystic readings and séances that fueled my interest in Magic.
Although most of my young boyhood was spent in the eastern England, my family’s roots in Germany brought with it a confirmed belief in ghosts, the supernatural and what might be loosely called witchcraft. As one might imagine, these beliefs were not at all contrary to those found in the mysterious British Isles, and I was more than happy to spend my childhood exploring ruins of haunted places in the west country of Devon and Cornwall, listening to fascinating stories about the witch counties and the magical inhabitants of that region in centuries past.
At that time, the people most likely to have the skills associated with “wise ones” were bands of itinerant people called Gypsies, mostly from Romania, who made their livings telling fortunes and selling packets of needles and thread or handmade dolls fashioned from bits of old cloth. These fascinating women, who oozed old world mystery, were thought to possess magical powers and would often be called in to “bless” sick farms animal by speaking an incantation, or were reputed to be capable of casting an “evil eye” on any child who was disobedient or willful. It was not until I was into my adolescence that I figured out how the threat of the evil eye might be nothing more than a weary parent’s hollow threat to keep their difficult child in line.
In my teens, I was totally captivated by the idea of sorcery and learned as much as I could about witchcraft or the HEXENKUNST. I was intrigued by famous magical personages, like Rasputin, “the mad monk” who was said to have the Tsarina of all the Russias under his spell, performing a kind of magic to keep her only son “Alexei” from dying of Hemophilia. It was later rumoured that it was almost impossible to kill this mysterious magician and faith healer, and that he had been administered generous amounts of potassium cyanide, beaten, and shot repeatedly, before he finally gave up the ghost by being thrown into the frozen River Neva and left submerged for a substantial period of time.
In keeping with the British passion for Agatha Christie who-done-its and all things mysterious, most small towns and villages took pride in numbering amongst them a group of people who defined themselves as witches. Some of them, who had grown up in the west country, bragged of a family lineage of witches and warlocks that dated back to the sixteenth century and the time when king James I of England scoured the countryside looking for demon worshippers and initiated the famous witch trials that swept the country like a plague. James was so obsessed with demons and those that called on them to do their bidding that he wrote a comprehensive book about it in 1597, called Daemonologie-In Forme of a Dialogue. The book was written largely to reinforce the tenets of the church, and its fiery language was designed to dissuade the uneducated populace from the practice of consulting the “wise ones” and lectured them on the evils of herbal magic and sorcery. It is no surprise that Shakespeare attributed his inspiration for the three witches in his “Scottish play” Macbeth to James, who had been the King of Scotland before becoming the ruler of England upon the death of Queen Elizabeth I. This hysteria and fear of witches and their demons persisted for a century and found its way to America and the Salem witch trials of 1693 that executed nineteen people charged with consorting with demons.
One of the Wicca “wise ones” that I had the pleasure of meeting was an elderly woman in a village near mine. She was distantly related to one of my chums, and was reputed to be the queen of the witched in several counties. I nagged him until he finally took me to meet her. The character of Lucy’s grandmother in the first books is very much based on this larger than life character, who my friend insisted was seen to lay motionless for days at a time, off on an astral journey, visiting her clansmen in other parts of the country without stirring from her bed.
The concept of magical objects lying around in plain sight (as I’ve noted several times throughout the series) was not new to me, since I had grown up with German superstitions that led me to believe that certain things were good omens and other things the harbingers of doom. A bird flying accidentally into your house was a certain portent of an untimely death. And if a clock stopped, or had been allowed to wind down, it signaled yet another demise of someone near and dear. Silver baby rattles from Harrods’s or Tiffany’s, given as christening gifts could never be thrown away, or the recipient, even though now an adult, would drop dead in their tracks. Pressed flowers from bridal bouquets, funeral wreaths or engagement parties were cherished for decades and passed along with other magical objects like silver spoons, wands made of glass and anything metal in the shape of a triangle.
My own grandmother was not a witch, but embraced many of the Wicca principles of communing with and understanding Nature. She was an herbalist and a bit of a chemist for her time. Growing up, I was told many stories about how she had used her herbal remedies to cure local people of diseases when the doctors had given up. She apparently used concoctions of all sorts, from deadly nightshade and rose hips to belladonna and goose droppings to bring her patients back to vigorous health. The one haunting detail that I always recall, whether true or apocryphal, is that she always requested three silver coins upon completion of the cure. One was to be given to her in payment, one was to be given to the church as an offering, and the third was to be buried under a full moon... giving thanks to the saints for the well-timed recovery.
The German idea of the Hexe was part of the tradition of both countries of my childhood, and has followed me here to American. But today, the concept of the “wise ones” is considered old fashioned. One seldom hears of a coven these days, and most certainly there would be someone objecting to it existence for one politically correct reason or another. But even though the idea of witches and wizards, people with special powers, has now been revamped and packaged into entertainment for streaming series and the big screen, I will always remember that it has its origins in the traditions of real magic, wherein real people with special gifts of focus and concentration can produce startling results, and that many of them quietly walk amongst us, unnoticed, even today.
Once again, I want to thank you for reading HEXE and hope that you find the story increasingly intriguing as the clash between Lucy and Helen intensifies. In the next installment, Lucy must awaken her dormant gifts of the KRAFT in order to protect her career, her lover and insure her very survival.
SMIB R. B.
Author Notes
Isobella Crowley
2nd October, 2019 - Austin, T
X
Hey Y’all, Izzie here.
First of all, I’d love to say a huge thank you. Thank you to you for reading this story and now reading the author shenanigans part here at the back of the book.
So you will have seen my name attached to this book, and I’d like to explain why. I mean, who the heck is this Isobella Crowley associated with this series?
Here’s the rub:
Breaking into publishing is hard.
When I did it, I wouldn’t have had the start that I had without a friend of mine helping me out and collaborating with me on my first real writing project. More than likely – and this is what happens with most new independent (indie) authors – I would have published a single book, and then watched in horror as nobody bought it, thus ending my writing career.
My friend saved me from that, allowing me to become a full-time author from day 1.
I’ll always be grateful for that.
And I want to do the same for Rex.
Rex is a dear friend of mine for several years now. His insight into human behavior and evolution has consistently amazed me. I shouldn’t have been so surprised and impressed when he shared with me his original version of Hexe – a 500 something work of genius – but I was.
Reading it was like cutting through butter.
I remember distinctly being incapacitated from illness for several weeks, and Hexe provided a HUGE comfort to me. I also felt that I was learning and evolving while being thoroughly entertained. I suspect this was on account of the historical insight he shares, as well as his fascinating take on actual craft magic!
