The Cast Iron Key

By Robert Rowell

Connor Barnes and his friends are not like others around the town of Whittier. Their interest in the paranormal does not blend with the views of the rural society they live in. When Connor discovers an old, abandoned cemetery on one of his motorcycle rides, he eagerly shares the find with his buddies. Unknown to them all, however, is that the investigation they embark on will ultimately affect them dramatically; not just at the time, but for years to come. Connor will find that the day he and his friends found the old house below the cemetery, nothing in their world would ever be the same again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Rowell
• Release date: Jun 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463888025

Robert Rowell

Born in Fort Worth, Texas. Spent nearly two decades traveling and working at various art shows, music venues and renaissance festivals. Worked at various jobs before and after that; some of which include working in a print shop, research center, laying industrial flooring, carpentry, stage work as well as being an entertainer and part-time stunt man (the last part is sort of a joke). Been an artist all my life and became interested in writing back in the latter part of high school.

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The Cast Iron Key

by: Robert K. Rowell

Copyright 2011, Robert K. Rowell

All Rights Reserved

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This is a work of fiction. The events, names and characters are imaginary; characters are fictitious and not intended to represent living persons.

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Chapter One the Beginning

Where to begin? It is, after all the typical question at the outset of any story. I have heard many different storytellers utter these words before launching into their tales for an audience. I guess the best place to start with this tale is to introduce myself to you. My name is Conner Barnes. I am what would be called a paranormal investigator in this day and age. I am forty five years old, with all the aches and pains that come along with an abused body of that age. In my younger days, I spent a lot of time looking for adventurous things to do with myself. Riding motorcycles, camping, hunting and fishing are just a few of those things. Growing up in a rural setting tends to cause young people with a restless spirit to search out activities that test their mettle and expand the horizons of their rather boring and limited world.

Whittier, the town where I went to high school was just such a place. The people of the town were concerned with cattle, crops and the seasonal tourist trade. Little of anything exciting or of prominent notation ever occurred in this small town situated near a fairly large lake. The population of the town itself was less than five thousand people, but that was only during the school year. Once summer came around, the population would swell to three or four times that when the tourists began to arrive. People from the surrounding large cities would flock to the lake and spend their vacations and weekends fishing, skiing and boating.

The reason I have stated all of this is that the tale I have to tell took place there during the junior year of my high school studies. Back then I was a slender fellow that stood about five foot, ten inches tall and weighed about one hundred and fifty pounds. My hair was a mass of long, light brown curls that hung down over my shoulders and almost obscured my deep, blue eyes. Unlike most of my fellow students, I did not suffer much from acne problems. My taste in clothing was that of a typical angst-ridden teenager of the late seventies; ratty and faded jeans, rock and roll T-shirts or military surplus clothing. In fact, I tended to wear the military clothing more than anything else. My overall appearance did not really fit in with the rest of the population of Whittier. For the most part, the rest of the town was geared more toward the country and western way of life. A young man whose interest in rock and roll music; more specifically, heavy metal was not exactly normal to the thinking of most folk in the area. Although, I must confess, there were some other kids in my school that shared my views and tastes. Not many, but a few. We were definitely a minority in the town.

Another thing that separated my friends and me from the rest of the populace was our interests in the supernatural. All of us were fond of ghost stories and science fiction, as well as fantasy novels and movies. We would gather together on weekends and during the summer months to camp out on the lake and take turns telling each other stories, or relating things we had read of, or seen on some TV show. These outings were also typically accompanied with drinking beer and smoking a little of the illicit herb. Now, I will admit, we all liked to get high; but none of us really had any tendency to go for anything of a harder nature than what I have mentioned. We were all content with just beer and pot. In the small town atmosphere we lived in, that was enough to get into plenty of trouble.

Of the small number of my friends there were two in particular that shared my avid interest in the realm of the supernatural and the unexplained. The first of these was Richard Kendale. He was a dreamer in the extreme sense of the phrase. Richard had read heavily upon Harry Houdini and other noted magicians of the previous century. He was quite adept as an amateur magician himself. He stood about six foot, one inch and weighed around one hundred and eighty pounds. His head was topped with blonde, tightly curled hair that bunched out from under a ball cap most of the time. He was a decent looking fellow with a mild acne problem and lightly stained and crooked teeth. Richard and I were the members of our little group that viewed things with a fairly pragmatic and scientific approach. He was the dreamer, as I said before; and I was the skeptic. We both tended to see something weird and baffling, and immediately tried to put a reasonable explanation in order.

The other member of this little group was a fellow named Clay Weston. Clay was from a Cajun family that had moved to Whittier from a small town out in the bayous of Louisiana. He was a very superstitious young man that stood about five foot, four inches tall and weighed about one hundred and thirty pounds. He was an awkward looking boy with dark brown hair and brown eyes with a sharp, hawk-like nose that was rather too large for his face. His teeth were crooked and tended to protrude from his slack lips most of the time. This tended to make him look like some kind of goofy, cartoon character. The prominent Adam’s-apple on his throat did not help any either. Despite his appearance, Clay was a good man that I was proud to call my friend.

The three of us had been getting together for several months on sporadic occasions to discuss the subjects related to the supernatural. We took specific interest in stories that were reported to be true hauntings, strange sightings of bizarre creatures or paranormal phenomenon. The first two categories are fairly self explanatory, but the last one I feel I should be more specific. Paranormal phenomenon refers to things like orbs of light, UFO sightings and crop circles, poltergeist activity or unexplained telekinetic activity, weird atmospheric occurrences, etc. On several of these occasions, we decided to take things beyond the stage of just sitting around a small campfire trading stories and smoking pot. We began to go to abandoned and untended cemeteries with a cheap tape recorder and an inexpensive camera to take pictures and run tapes. On many occasions we would collect E.V.P.’s, which is electronic voice phenomenon. Less seldom we would get images on film that were not present when the pictures were taken. The tape recorder was mine, while Richard supplied the camera and film. Clay, on the other hand, usually supplied the beer and the pot. It is the outset of one of these meetings that Richard informed me of a fellow he met that lived nearby. A young man named Ty Rollings.

Richard took us to meet Ty one evening, at his residence near Cedar Creek along the eastern shore of the lake. This was not far from my own house which was just a few miles north along the same shoreline. When we arrived, I learned that Ty had moved here from a major city north of Whittier. It was a large house that was built out over the bluff above the water. Ty’s father was a lawyer, and he and his son did not get along that well. As it turned out, Ty was a poor little rich kid that was able to afford just about anything that struck his fancy. Unlike Clay, Richard and I, this young man had a house of his own, with his own recording studio in it. He had a new Trans-Am parked in his garage and a four-wheel drive Jeep CJ-5 sitting in his driveway. I could go on listing all the nice stuff that Ty owned, but it has little relevance to the story. Suffice it to say, that this young man had it made; unlike the rest of us.

What we did have in common was an interest in the paranormal. Richard had met Ty during a party one night, and the two got to talking about ghosts and hauntings. When Richard learned that Ty was an enthusiast, and that he had some cool camera and recording equipment, he began to tell Ty about us and our forays in the surrounding area. Instantly, Ty wanted to meet us, so Richard made sure to arrange it. It was quickly evident to me that Ty was prone to be condescending toward us; strictly on the fact that we were not as affluent as his own family. I’m sure it was just how he was raised, but I never cared much for the way he postured and presented himself. However, he was quite willing to loan us his equipment for our field research. Richard was eager to invite him along with us, but to my own relief, Ty was not interested in doing any of the actual work involved. He only required us to come back and let him see the results of our labors. For me, it was a very small price to pay so that we could use his more expensive and higher grade equipment without having to suffer his presence. This may sound a bit unfair on my part towards Ty; but in my own defense, I never understood what it was about money that made people think they were better than others just because they had more of it. Truthfully, I am not even sure if Ty was aware of how he presented himself in this fashion. Throughout the time that I knew him, I kept these thoughts to myself.

I got used to keeping my own counsel when it came to people and their opinions. The area around Whittier was populated by a predominantly white majority, with very few African-American families and even fewer Latino families mixed in. I saw plenty of racial injustice during my years of living there, and had my share of being around those that were prejudice. One of the things that set me and my friends apart from the rest of the community was the fact that the prejudice mind-set did not take with us. It didn’t matter what color a person was, or what religious beliefs they had; we were cool with anyone who was cool with us. If they showed us disrespect or aggression, however, we were very willing to respond likewise and send them packing.

Another aspect of beliefs during the late nineteen-seventies around Whittier was that most folks did not have the open-minded view that we did about the paranormal or the supernatural. Just the mention of ghosts or spirits, apparitions and recordings of noises and voices would have them looking at you as if they were measuring you for a straight jacket. There were very few people that took such subjects very seriously. Unlike today, there were few in the academic world that would take any evidence presented in a fair and unbiased light. Most of the time, a professor or a scientist would take one look at us and immediately figure we were just a bunch of kids that had been out getting high and started having hallucinations. Or, they would simply pronounce our evidence as being a hoax without ever bothering to study any of it.

It is in this setting that my story begins, on one of these occasions where I sat around with my companions discussing the unexplained. It was a time of wonder for us, exploring the coming age in our own way while watching the world grow into the era of the nineteen-eighties. Changes were on the horizon for our generation, like disco, the desktop computer, the internet, cell phones and palm pilots. You still had to talk to a person over the telephone back then; people still wrote letters to each other, instead of sending an e-mail. I miss it very much.

Chapter Two the Discovery

It was the middle part of December, 1979. In less than a month would begin a brand new decade and signal the end of the old one. I had spent a cold, and somewhat windy Saturday riding around the outskirts of the countryside of Whittier, trying to forget that I had one more week of school before the Christmas break began. Bundled up against the cold air, with the sound of a 250cc Honda engine vibrating in my ears, I viewed the rolling hills of oak forests that went by as I flew down a dirt road. Riding my motorcycle was one of my releases from the boring existence that was my life in this small town. Although I was not that fond of the town of Whittier, the area around the lake was something that I was very entranced with. During the autumn and winter months, I could go to many places on the lake and have them to myself. It was many times that I would go off by myself and ride into the woods for hours without seeing another soul. Leaving the paved and dirt roads behind me, I would steer the bike down various cattle or deer trails to venture into the untouched areas that most folks did not even realize existed. This particular day, however, I was staying on the dirt roads. A severe downpour that had lasted for several days had ended just the day before, leaving the surrounding low-lying areas sodden and boggy with fresh mud. I had no intention of having to wash massive amounts of it from me or my motorcycle after the ride.

I had been in the saddle for nearly three hours, starting to feel the beginnings of a lower back ache. It was nearing eleven o’clock in the morning and the sun had broken through the scattered clouds long enough to warm the day just a little. I was about five or six miles to the northeast of Whittier, still out in the rural farmlands. The last residence I had passed was about three miles back due north. I was coming up a long hill that was covered with thick woods and was choked with undergrowth on either side of the road. I began to feel the need to stop and take a rest from the ache in my lower back and have a cigarette while the engine of the bike had a chance to cool down. Despite that the temperature in the air was cold the continuous riding I had been doing had made the bike hot. As I neared the top of the long hill, I realized that the barbed-wire fence on my left had given way to a rusty, wrought-iron fence that stood about four feet high. Slowing my speed, I turned my head and realized that there were objects hidden within the tall grass on the other side of this fence. At the top of the hill the fence was broken by the presence of two wide gates that were topped by an elaborate arch made of the same rusty, wrought-iron. I brought the bike to a stop in front of these and gazed up to read the name hanging above the gates. Yarrow Cemetery. The letters had been cut out of iron in an Old English style. They were resting upon a lattice-work of rusty metal suspended upon two damaged and bent poles. It leaned out toward the road like the head of a large beast, looming over the short path that led to the rusty gates.

I turned the front wheel of the bike and idled over out of the road. With my grubby combat boot I shoved the kick-stand down and leaned the weight of the bike on it. Keeping my eyes upon the tall grass and the obscured tombstones, my gloved hand reached over and flicked the kill-switch to the engine. As the motor died, the ensuing silence was almost complete. Only the wind and a distant bird disturbed the quiet as I got off the bike. Stretching my muscles, my eyes scanned over the various monuments that rose above the tall grass inside the ancient fence. All of the stone markers that met my gaze were covered with tarnish-stains and moss. Some of them were just simple blocks with fluted edges, topped with crosses of different styles. Others were topped with statues of different images; angels, lambs, cherubs and wreaths as well as a few with the Masonic symbols of the square and the compass.

As I looked over the cemetery, I pulled out a pack of smokes and shook out a cigarette. Sticking the butt in my mouth, I shoved the pack back into the breast pocket of my field jacket and dug out my Zippo lighter. As I lit the smoke, I walked over to lean upon the rusty gates and continued to study the grounds inside the fence. From down the hill, I could hear the sound of a vehicle approaching along the road. Glancing back the way I had come, I could see an old pickup slowly making its way up the hill. Taking another long drag of the cigarette, I watched until the truck had passed by. The old man driving the late-fifties rattle-trap just stared at me as he went by, keeping his face set in a stern look of distaste. I could not help but chuckle, since it was typical of the older farmers to display an outright dislike for anyone who rode a motorcycle; especially a young man with long hair, wearing a military jacket and smoking a cigarette. I