Broken Barriers

Ms. B. at the "real" Black Tooth Pond in 2010

A little excerpt from the sequel to The House at Black Tooth Pond (possibly titled Broken Barriers at this point)...

My God, she thought, aware of a vague but mounting apprehension, the people of this town had no concept of the horror that had taken root here, somewhere in its dim, distant past. After however many eons, this horror still prevailed, even if it lurked half-hidden in the darkest, most desolate corner of this county. Barely over a month ago, a malign, inhuman something had lashed out and erased from existence at least six individuals, leaving scarcely a trace of tangible evidence. Whether this inhuman something sprang from the same dark netherworld she had infiltrated twelve years earlier or an altogether different one, she had no idea. She didn’t really care to know.

However, preventing any further incursion by the something in question was her job.

Aiken Mill, Virginia. “The cold case capital of the world,” she’d heard this town called.

She slowed her jet-black Ford Expedition and parked it in a muddy circle at the end of the rutted dirt road she’d followed from the main highway. Beyond the windshield, a barrier of tall reeds impeded her view of the misty space beyond.

As she opened the door, a gust of icy air swirled inside and pummeled her face, so she grabbed her black knit stocking cap from the passenger seat, tugged it over her mop of dark brown hair until it covered her ears. Then she slid out and onto the uneven, half-frozen layer of mud. Yeah, it was cold out here, even colder than Alexandria when she’d left this morning. She paused for a moment and glanced around at the skeletal trees that towered around her. But there was no wind now. Not even a whisper of breeze.

Silent.

Damn near creepy.

She ambled toward a narrow gap in the barrier of reeds at the end of the earthen circle and peered into the space beyond.

There it was, glowering in the shadows beneath the skyscraping trees: the dark, glistening surface of Black Tooth Pond, named for the array of jagged, broken tree trunks that protruded from its far end. Around its banks, a thin layer of mist swirled and shimmered like a living, silken shroud. She saw no other movement, heard no sound except the gentlest of lapping of water at the nearest banks.

Still, she sensed an ethereal, dangerous atmosphere about this place, which raised her hackles anew.

And then…

A sharp, warbling trill, uncannily loud, pealed from somewhere in the distance.

A bird cry. The eerie, mournful voice of a whippoorwill.

Only it wasn’t a whippoorwill.

The cry had an unnerving, alien quality, for it was produced by some organ of sound that did not belong to any bird.

She listened for many long seconds, but the cry did not repeat. Whatever had made it was still out there, though. She could feel it: the uncomfortable certainty that some unknown, unstoppable—unearthly—predator was watching her.

After a couple of minutes, her anxiety diminished slightly, and she gazed again at the far end of the pond, studying the jagged, blackened tree trunks, the last remnants of some ancient forest fire.

She had seen countless photographs of this location and read the detailed reports filed by FBI Special Agent Tyler Kincaid, who had headed the Federal investigation of the previous month’s events in Aiken Mill. He had hoped to gather more intel about this place by placing a half-dozen trail cams at various points around the pond and in the woods. However, he had reported that, for reasons unknown, the batteries in those devices continually died within minutes, and none, during their short lifespans, had recorded anything unusual.

Two decades ago, Agent Kincaid had experienced a Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind—a physical interaction with something not of this Earth. It had changed both his life and his official job description. It was for this reason that he had been chosen to lead the FBI investigation of Aiken Mill’s missing six. What he found was a dire—and patently unbelievable—state of affairs.

Therefore, Kincaid’s superiors had turned the case over to Majestik.

And Majestik had dispatched Agent Celeste Muir to take up the torch.

# 

"Black Tooth Pond" by Charles Hill

New Banner for Authorcon

With Scares That Care: AuthorCon VI coming up next month in Williamsburg, VA, I figured I should make a new, updated banner for my vendor space in the main ballroom. In a vast area with several hundred exceptional writers packed in, visibility is paramount, and while I'll keep using my older banner for the front of the table, I hope a nice tall one will help pinpoint my location in the room.

The con runs from February 27 to March 1, 2026, at the Doubletree by Hilton Williamsburg. Scares That Care is a charity that, in its twenty years of existence, has raised and donated nearly a half-million dollars to organizations and families with a child affected by illness or burns, and women fighting breast cancer. A substantial percentage of the proceeds from AuthorCon go directly to the charity.

Yesterday, there was a geocaching event at The Cheesecake Factory in Greensboro, and since we needed to run a few errands down yonder, Ms. B. and I decided to attend. She tells me that I have been to The Cheesecake Factory before—a few years ago with friends—but I have no recollection of this. I suspect that she might have drugged me while she picked up copious amounts of cheesecake from the place and then, in case I had some vague memory of the dastardly deed, decided to bamboozle me by insisting I'd been there myself. I think not. We ate some good, if monstrously overpriced food. The geocaching company was excellent.

 

After the event, Ms. B, had some errands to run in town, including a trip to Costco. And once the necessities were concluded, we hied ourselves over to Cooper's Hawk Restaurant and Tavern to sample their spirits (excellent), and then State Street Wine Company, which, when we lived in Greensboro, was a nearby, always enjoyable venue to snag a few drinks. It is, of course, considerably farther away now, but whenever we visit Greensboro, if State Street is open, that's where you'll find Brugger and Rainey.

 

So, it was a nice outing to our old hometown. I'll be going back next week for a dentist appointment. Not quite so fun.

KOLCHAK ERAS Is in the House

My contributor copy of Kolchak Eras has arrived from Monstrous Media. This one features my story, "Up From the Underground," along with a dozen more escapades of the inimitable Carl Kolchak from the classic Night Stalker TV series starring Darren McGavin.

FROM THE PUBLISHER: "Carl Kolchak has faced more than his share of monsters throughout his infamous career. Now, Monstrous Books presents 13 short stories chronicling the intrepid reporter's exploits from his time in World War II until his semi-retirement in the 1990s. Kolchak's luck runs out during World War II. Devils in the outfield stir up trouble in the '50s. A road trip with editor Tony Vincenzo in the '70s takes a turn for the worse. Lovecraftian horrors escape from the beyond in the '80s. A dead cult leader threatens to return in the '90s."

This is fun stuff...and scary!

 

Edited by James Aquilone, Kolchak Eras includes tales by James Chambers, James Aquilone, Bobby Nash, David Avallone, Will McDermott, Natching T. Kassa, Owl Goingback, Jim Beard, Lev Butts, Charles R Rutledge, Lisa Morton, and Simon Bestwick

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Order Kolchak Eras at Amazon.com here

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Oh, To Be Young Again and Others

Now, where do you reckon that geocache is? If you said somewhere up in that tree, then you'd be right. More on that in a few moments....

It was a lovely morning, so I headed toward some caches within about an hour's drive south of here. A trio of them lurked in the Caswell County, NC, gamelands, so I made those my initial targets. Each of them required solving a little puzzle to obtain the final coordinates, none of which were complicated...

...Unless you transpose a couple of numbers in the solution. At one of them, I ended up trekking into terrain that I would rate T4 (T5 being the most difficult), which I didn't think was quite right. I finally checked the cache page to see what the true rating was (it turned out to be T1.5), so I knew I'd made an egregious boo-boo. I reworked the puzzle, and, lo, I was indeed several hundred feet off. So, with some difficulty, I made my way back to the proper location where, happily, I found the cache in a wink.

Next up, there was a hide located several hundred feet across the main roadway into what looked like not-terribly-dense woodland. So, rather than drive around the long way to the recommended starting point, I figured, well, why not bushwhack? I needed the exercise. About 300 feet in, after wading through endless barriers of briers and other painful pricklies, I determined that this was the worst idea ever devised by a human being. Thus, I went back and did things the regulation way. For this, at least, I was rewarded with a quick find.

Next up, some ways down the road, there was a cache called "Oh, To Be Young Again" (GCB9JMV), the description of which suggested that I might have to climb a tree. And this made me happy because I love climbing trees. Once I reached the location, I found the proper tree quickly, and found myself facing a conundrum. The lowest branch was just above my head, and its diameter was too large to get a firm enough grip to pull myself up. However...

Behind the nearby park building, I found some empty five-gallon paint buckets, so I grabbed a couple and stacked them so that I could get that extra step needed to boost myself upward. And shortly, I had the cache in hand.

Now, getting back down was a little trickier, but I didn't break or bend anything I shouldn't have. So...yay.

After these, the subsequent caches were generally easy and, of course, very satisfying. But, perhaps needless to say, it's the challenging hides that are, in the end, most memorable and the most fun.

On an altogether different subject, today marks one year since Frazier left us. I'd had him for 18 years, and I felt a pretty strong rush of grief today. But our house is still full of cats, and they are as loved as probably any cats on the face of the earth—even if they feel they are perpetual victims of the Great Starvation.

Old dude on the hunt

L: The tree; R: The reward

The Land Route

A new geocache came out yesterday at the Knight Brown Preserve along the banks of Belews Lake, NC, not too far south of here. I was otherwise disposed yesterday, and friend Tom, a.k.a. Night-Hawk, picked up the first-to-find honors. This morning, though, it was so pretty outside that heading after the cache seemed like just the ticket. Now, this cache, "More Kayaking on Belews Lake" (GCBH33D) is intended to be reached by watercraft, but since I have none, I was relegated to the land route. There are a couple of older caches out here that I found by said land route about five years ago, so I was heading for familiar territory. It's about a three-mile round trip, and I walk or run well over that every day; the only difference being that the terrain out here gets pretty rugged in places.

Once I got out there, I managed to find the cache quickly. The container was nothing out of the ordinary, but this was such a welcome outing, almost entirely free of other human beings, which right now more than hit the spot. Fortunately, for the most part, my interactions with individuals in the real world are generally cordial, and I know a lot of genuinely wonderful people. But the awful hatred (and delusional thinking) online, especially in regard to any number of current events, has about worn down my patience, and thus I've found myself quicker to anger than I like (and at the best of times, my patience is anything but infinite).

So, taking the land route today made me very happy. Peace to ye.

A North Myrtle New Year

Tuesday, December 30, 2025

To celebrate New Year's, Brugger and I usually go... somewhere... more often than not with friends. This year, we'd settled on North Myrtle Beach, including special guest stars Terry & Beth and Bob & Yvonne. As it turned out, Bob & Yvonne couldn't get away on Tuesday with the rest of us, so they opted to come down on Wednesday morning.

Brugger and I took off about 9:30 a.m. this morning, bound for a nice condo called Crescent Sands we'd found in North Myrtle. On a previous trip southward, we'd stopped for lunch at La Cabana Mexican Restaurant in Rockingham, NC, which was really excellent, so we visited it again this time. Again, excellent. I highly recommend their margaritas.

I snagged a handful of geocaches along the way, and we rolled into our lodgings at the beach about 4:00 p.m. Terry & Beth had just arrived themselves, so we opened a couple of bottles of wine—the really good wine—and generally made merry. Just before sunset, I hoofed it up the beach to find a cache. Done and done. We enjoyed some fabulous smoked pulled pork for dinner, courtesy Terry & Beth's son, Brian, and then spent the evening shooting all kinds of shit. As of now, as it's closing on midnight, we're about shit-shot out, and our beds are calling us loudly.

 

Till tomorrow.

Wednesday, December 31, 2025

I was up and at 'em first thing this morning, heading into the wilds of North Myrtle for some caching—after a bucket of coffee, of course. I set my sights on two relatively nearby hides. I found one; the other one, a puzzle cache, was missing a vital piece of information for the final coordinates, so it was, unfortunately, a bust. The scenery was cool, at least.

Shortly, I got back to Crescent Sands, Bob & Yvonne arrived. We had a fairly massive charcuterie spread for lunch, courtesy of Beth, Kimberly, and Yvonne, along with a few lovely beverages (Dark & Stormies for Brugger and me). During the afternoon, I went trucking around the long outdoor corridors to get in my daily steps and burn off the lunch drink. It was pretty danged cold out there, I can tell you.

 

Toward the end of the afternoon, we gathered ourselves up and headed to Wine Therapy, a nice little wine bar a couple of miles up the road. It was happy hour, so we sampled several wines, all of which were very good, and some were even better.

 

We had reservations for 6:00 p.m. at The Brentwood Restaurant in Little River, not far up the road, so we arrived right on time and had a fine feast for our last dinner of 2025. I had escargot, duck confit, and bread pudding, with a very good Willamette Pinot Noir to accompany. I think everyone was satisfied with their choices, and our servers were excellent. They've been implementing a new payment system, though, and it didn't work properly, so we had to spend a fair while afterward trying to sort things out. I think it's all good, but if not, I think everything will be made right. (This was NOT a cheap dinner.)

I picked up a nearby cache afterward, and then we retired to Crescent Sands, where we played dice games and generally made merry for most of the evening. A little before midnight, Ms. B. and I went walkies on the beach, though we found neither fog nor fireworks, which have traditionally been the hallmarks of New Year's Eve at the beach. It was frigid and windy out yonder, so we didn't walk far.

At the strike of midnight, we old folks enjoyed a champagne toast and then crashed for the night. Happy New Year.

Thursday, January 1, 2026 Bob & Yvonne made a fantastic breakfast of bacon, eggs, and toast this morning, and talk about hitting the spot. It hit the spot, yes. Afterward, I ventured out on the caching trail, i.e., south toward Myrtle Beach proper. The highlight was a long walk on the East Coast Greenway, where I found three caches and a couple of cool sights—a large fossil rock and a big tree trunk carved into a bench, labeled "Caution." I found it amusing. At the end of it all, I found eight caches, which, for me, cleans out most of the Myrtle Beach area, except for several way down south toward Surfside. I expect I'll have an opportunity to hunt those on a future trip—and it'd be nice if some new ones come out between now and then.

L: Interesting fossil rock found along the trail; R: My first signed log of 2026

Don't sit on THAT bench!

Once back at Crescent Sands, I had a wee lunch, courtesy of Yvonne, who made some ham & cheese sliders. Soon, the women all went shopping, leaving Bob, Terry, and me to our own devices. These devices included going to a nearby liquor store and buying Bloody Mary fixings. We took advantage of those and made Bloody Marys. Twice over.

During this little spell of mellow time, I made reservations at a nice VRBO in Providence, RI, in August, when Kim and I will be heading up to Necronomicon and very likely Newport.

 

For dinner, we opted for Landshark Bar & Grill at nearby Barefoot Landing, a resort area where we spent many good times in years past with my late, much-lamented friend Bridgett and her husband, Gerry. Dinner was very enjoyable—good food, drinks, and service.

 

And so that pretty much completed our New Year's adventure. In general, this trip turned out to be fairly low-key; a bit more mellow than some in recent years. All in all, though, this made for a welcome respite from some of the lunacy in our "normal" day-to-day states of being.

 

May 2026's light shine bright for all of us.