I Wonder What That Is...

Well, it sure looks like something is out there at Black Tooth Pond.

My work on the sequel to The House at Black Tooth Pond is coming closer and closer to its end. Only a couple of chapters more, I believe, before I can slap "The End" on it. And then we shall see...

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

Expressions 2025

Brugger isn't holding up her framed artwork in the photo at left, which is how it struck me after I took the picture. She's actually holding a wine glass in that hand (imagine that, heh heh).

Ms. B. regularly features nature in her mixed-media art, which usually includes flowers, mushrooms, insects, snails, fish, and other flora and fauna. Our local art center—Piedmont Arts—which she recently joined, presents a major art exhibition every year called "Expressions." She entered two pieces, which are pictured here. The show opened last night with a well-attended reception at the art center, complete with free hors d'oeuvres and spirits.

 

Also present was artist and longtime friend, Charles Hill, whom I've known since elementary school. I've posted examples of his work on my blog in the past (some of which you may see here and also here, with his paintings of "The House of Caviness" and "Black Tooth Pond," which inspired my novel...wait for it...The House at Black Tooth Pond). He's had some serious health problems lately, but he's doing better, and I was very glad to see him and his work at the show last night.

 

Back in the early 1980s, after I graduated college with a Bachelor of Fine Art degree, I was an active member of Piedmont Arts, where I frequently exhibited and taught classes. I don't do much in the way of fine art anymore, that's for sure, but I very much enjoy revisiting my artistic roots at Piedmont Arts. And I'm sure Ms. B. will do plenty more exhibiting. The Expressions exhibit will be up for a month, I believe, so if you're local, you should stop in and check out some truly excellent art!

THE HOUSE AT BLACK TOOTH POND Now Up for Pre-Order!

Artist Charles Hill's rendering of "Black Tooth Pond" (a.k.a. Lester Pond), as it appeared in the 1970s/1980s

My new novel, The House at Black Tooth Pond, is scheduled for release by Macabre Ink (the horror imprint of Crossroad Press) on February 11, 2025. The ebook and paperback editions are now up for pre-order here. Just for shits and giggles, I thought I'd write up a little missive about the novel's setting. Also note that the novel is an expansion of my short story of the same title, which recently appeared in the anthology Shunned Houses, edited by Katherine Kerestman and S.T. Joshi.

The World of Black Tooth Pond
"Black Tooth Pond" is a name I coined many years ago for a small body of water hidden in the woods behind Martinsville High School. My introduction to it came by way of a tenth-grade biology class outing to conduct water-quality experiments. I'd had no idea the place existed, and finding this pond, shrouded in morning mist, an array of black, tooth-like tree trunks protruding from one end, really fired my imagination. The name "Black Tooth Pond" immediately sprang to mind, and as far as I was concerned, that became its official moniker. I discovered in later years that it was known as "Lester Pond," after the name of the landowner. In 2010, I wrote a fairly lengthy blog about my subsequent adventures at and around the pond, which you may find here.

Last year, after more than a decade, I decided to check it out again (blog entry here). To my dismay, I found that, while the pond still existed, all the woods around it had been clear-cut (as have all too many pristine woodlands in this county). I was informed that those woods were considered valuable only for their timber, which is, in my book, among the most deplorable attitudes of the entire human species, so the landowners can go fuck themselves. But that's a whole 'nuther story.

A fictional version of Black Tooth Pond became a semi-regular setting in my tales of Aiken Mill/Sylvan County, Virginia, a location loosely based on Martinsville and the surrounding counties of Patrick, Henry, Franklin, and Floyd.

Left: Black Tooth Pond (a.k.a. Lester Pond) in December 2010; Right: the pond in November 2023

The House of Cabiness
The place I call the House of Cabiness — the "haunted house" of the title — was an old homestead out in another part of Henry County that my brother, Phred, and I discovered back around 1990 while roaming the backroads in his pickup truck, which was a regular activity in those days, oftentimes with his dog Luther accompanying. I'm not going to state that we necessarily went out to the boonies to fire up illicit substances or anything, but... well, sometimes, we might have done some not-at-all smart things.

On one of our nighttime outings, we found a little dirt road that led back into some pretty deep woods, so we decided to follow it. We could only drive so far before the road petered out into a rough footpath, so we parked the truck and continued a piéd. After a while, I noticed that the silhouettes of the nearby trees against the starry sky became curiously boxlike, and I realized I was seeing the contours of a totally overgrown old house. Phred and I both loved finding such "haunted" places, so we wandered around the exterior of the structure as best we could with only cigarette lighters to light our way. Much in the way of Black Tooth Pond, this old place captured our imaginations, and so we decided to return to the house in daylight.

I don't recall whether it was the next day or sometime later, but anyway, Phred and I did return, this time with flashlights, and made a thorough exploration of the inside. Did you ever see The Blair Witch Project? Well, the inside of this house looked very much like that. We found a huge stack of old mail, twenty to thirty years old, some unopened, addressed to various members of the Cabiness family. (In the novel, I changed this to "Caviness," simply because the "cabin" part of the name somehow seemed a little too much given the title of the tale.)

The most ridiculous part of all this was that, not long afterward, one of my brother's college friends, who was getting married, decided to come visit Phred the night before his wedding, and — for his de facto "bachelor party" — we ventured out to the house. The next thing I knew, my brother, his friend, an additional friend, and I all piled into that house with not one flashlight to our names and went wandering about. I know not how, but we avoided the plentiful, bottomless holes in the floors; went up the fucking rickety stairs; and, somehow, did not die.

I returned to the place a few times after that and took some photographs, both inside and out, but that was all within a few months of our original adventure. I'm quite certain that the house no longer exists; for one thing, it was on the verge of falling down over thirty years ago, and for the second thing, Google Maps shows that in that area — sadly, as around Black Tooth Pond — all the woods have been fucking cut down. God awmighty, sometimes I despise humanity for the damage we inflict on our very home.

Anyhoo, all this gives you a bit of backstory for the settings you'll find in both the story "The House at Black Tooth Pond," and the novel of the same name. I surely do hope this whets your appetite.

Bye now!

Artist Charles Hill's rendering of the House of Cabiness, "cleaned-up"

Left: My pen & ink rendering of the old house, circa 1990; Right: a photo of the actual location, circa 1990

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Pre-Order The House at Black Tooth Pond
(ebook and paperback)

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WIP Excerpt: The House at Black Tooth Pond

Not very long ago, I wrote a haunted house story, titled "The House at Black Tooth Pond," for an upcoming anthology, which will be appearing later this year. I've made blog posts about the place I call Black Tooth Pond, which is inspired by an honest-to-God location here in Martinsville (the most recent blog being "Black Friday at Black Tooth Pond," Friday, November 25, 2023). For the story, I combined that real-life setting with another: an ancient, crumbling house my brother and I discovered not far from Martinsville in the early 1990s. I called it the House of Cabiness because, inside the place, I discovered a massive cache of old mail, all addressed to members of a certain Cabiness family. I suspect that place is long gone, since so little of it remained intact even then, but the memory of it has haunted me ever since.

The drawing above is one I did back when Brother Phred and I found the place.

I believe the story makes for a fine stand-alone tale, but the more I contemplated the idea, it felt like one that could be expanded into a full-length novel. So, quite recently, I set about scheming and plotting and plotting and scheming, and I came up with a workable novel project. At the moment, I'm roughly 30k words into the writing, so I thought I'd offer a little excerpt. Here she be:

#

As Martin sauntered along the walkway, mostly looking at his feet, he heard a deep, booming voice rising above the soft student babble around him. The voice was shouting, “Sinners, take heed! The end times are near! Take heed, all of ye!”

Oh, hell. One of the endless supply of proselytizers that seemed to target the campus more and more lately. They’d always been around, maybe even more so back in his university days, but there recently seemed to have been a resurgence.

The voice came from a huge, black-suited man, with wide, glittering eyes beneath a heavy brow. He stood on the walkway just shy of the stairs to Reynolds Hall. Unless Martin diverted around to the side door, he couldn't avoid walking directly in front of the fellow. In one hand, the man held a thick sheaf of papers—flyers or tracts, no doubt. None of the students passing nearby appeared to take even the vaguest notice of him.

Good for them.

As he approached, he kept his eyes down and walked by without the fellow taking any special notice of him.

Until he reached the stairs of Reynolds Hall. And then the deep voice bellowed, “Beware, Dr. Pritchett, the doom that came to Eden, the country of the snake!”

Martin whirled around, incredulous, and saw the figure standing on the walkway with one arm outstretched, pointing directly toward him.

“Do you not know what you have disturbed, Dr. Pritchett?"

He took a few steps back toward the towering figure. He’d never seen the man before in his life. How could he know his name? Maybe a former student? No. He didn't think so.

But those words. Martin knew them. They came from the pages he’d taken from the House of Cabiness. But no one besides his brother could be privy to what he’d done. No one else could have been out there to see him. Who could possibly know what was written on those ancient sheets?

No one.

No one alive.

#

Black Friday at Black Tooth Pond

I needed to perform maintenance on a geocache out on the Dick & Willie Trail near uptown, so I headed out fairly and hiked out to it. Once I'd replaced the old, damaged container, on a whim, I decided to drive over to my old high school and see if I could get back to Black Tooth Pond, where I'd misspent countless hours back in my checkered past (you can read about an early adventure or two here,)

I gave Black Tooth Pond its name because, when I first discovered it, several hundred yards down a little dirt road behind the high school, a large number of old tree trunks protruded from the water at the pond's farthest end. (In more recent years, my dear, late friend Pete Wells, an expert in local history, informed me its actual name is Lester Pond; the Lesters have been a prominent family in this area for many, many years.) In 11th grade, circa 1976, my biology class hoofed it down the old road to the pond and took samples to test for water quality. Later, I furthered my education here with a select number of female specimens of the species. Not long afterward, I returned to the area to conduct experiments with certain chemical substances, the results of which are in mostly hazy.

I knew from looking at Google Maps that, some time ago, most of the woods around the pond had been razed, which pisses me off royally. (Around these parts, wooded areas no longer stay wooded very long. I'm assuming the motherfuckers want the trees solely for the wood, since, inevitably, only hideous scrub grows back in place of the once-healthy forests.) Thankfully, the pond remains back there amid all those now-desolate acres, though with only a thin ring of living trees surrounding it. Almost all the old trunks that once jutted from the far end of the pond have finally succumbed to the elements. Only a couple of very small, stubby trunks still protrude from the water.

Still, I very much enjoyed walking back there and taking a few photos. My latest short story, titled "The House at Black Tooth Pond," which is based both on this location and an ancient, abandoned house my brother and I discovered out in the county a good thirty years ago, will be appearing next year in a new anthology, titled Shunned Houses, edited by S.T. Joshi and Katherine Kerestman. Of course, I will post updates on the book as it gets nearer to release time.

Black Friday indeed.

View of Black Tooth Pond from 2010. As you can see, in those days, far more unspoiled forest surrounded it. More of the old tree trunks in the water are visible here, although even then, they were far fewer and smaller than when I first laid eyes on the location in the mid-1970s.

Another current view

A very old bench overlooking the water

A view of the current terrain, which up until recently was lush, beautiful forestland.