Letters From A Dead World: A Collection Of Short Stories

By David Tocher

Do you have a taste for terror?

Discover the power of a telepathic teenager who communicates with the living dead. Witness the nightmare visions of a widowed husband whose departed wife warns him of unspeakable interdimensional horrors. Face the wrath of angry ghosts who confront a phony psychic, showing him the true horror of his deceptive commerce.

And more.

Brace yourself for Letters from a Dead World - six terrifying stories spawned from the macabre imagination of David Tocher. With a uniquely Canadian flavour, this collection will leave you breathless, grappling with the darkest fears that haunt us all.

This book contains adult content and is not suitable for readers under the age of 18.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Next Chapter
• Release date: Aug 4, 2023

Book preview

Letters From A Dead World

Letters From A Dead World

A Collection Of Short Stories

David Tocher

Copyright (C) 2023 David Tocher

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2023 by Next Chapter

Published 2023 by Next Chapter

Edited by Graham (Fading Street Services)

Cover art by Lordan June Pinote

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

For Bill and Andrea Funk.

Contents

Introduction

Nancy Kilpatrick

Letters From A Dead World

Chelsea Mourning

Feather Canyon

Confidence Man

Rebecca Raven

Ekphrasis

About the Author

Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better.

—Ecclesiastes, Chapter 7

Introduction

Nancy Kilpatrick

In 2010, I met David Tocher in the downtown Montreal Chapters/Indigo bookstore. He was standing next to me in the horror section and said, Are you Nancy Kilpatrick? We chatted a bit and I learned that he was a writer. I was looking for stories for an anthology I was editing--Evolve 2: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead--and invited him to submit a tale. I bought the story Chelsea Mourning, included in this collection of David’s short fiction, Letters From a Dead World.

David and I met again at a book convention where the anthology was launched. I sensed anew that he was a determined young man, intent on redirecting his life to focus on writing fiction. As with many new writers, he had studied fiction writing in courses but went a step further. Since that time, he has acquired credentials as an editor through various correspondence venues, including the University of Queensland (UQx), and HarvardX.

Anyone who is a full- or part-time writer knows that understanding the ins-and-outs of editing provides a huge benefit in terms of writing. At this point, David is well on his way to being both a talented creative writer and an editor. As you read the stories in this collection, that will soon become obvious. What is even more obvious is how well David finesses a conjunction: two worlds occurring simultaneously for the same character(s).

Almost everyone has experienced moments where they might say: Gee, it’s been a while and I was just thinking about you and I turn a corner and there you are! That is coincidence. Synchronicity, in the meaning used by Carl Jung and others, involves big, lifechanging moments. We know something important has occurred which we couldn’t have known about in advance. This is synchronizing two realities, our inner or personal world, and the external world so that two things line up perfectly at the same time and make for an extraordinary event. A person away from family whose parent suddenly dies, knowing the exact moment of death, although there was no warning of illness or accident. An escalating and unnerving fear and sense of devastation as a cataclysmic earthquake occurs on the other side of the planet, a place where we have never been and know little or nothing about. These extremely rare, out-of-the-blue events leave us startled. It seems as if an invisible seam in time has split for a second and we become aware that reality is deeper and more layered than we had imagined.

This is what you will find in this dark fantasy and horror fiction collection Letters From a Dead World. Protagonists see or sense dead people that impress themselves on the living in different ways, the outcomes unpredictable. Such preternatural occurrences can result in a lift in consciousness for the protagonist that benefits life-in-general. Or, they could go the other way. In good fiction, protagonists have a problem which leads to a solution, one they can either learn from, or not.

Letters From a Dead World, the story for which this collection is named, takes place at the start of an apocalypse, forcing a teenager to do what he never envisioned he could do.

Chelsea Mourning reveals how bitterness and resentment from past injustices bring choices: turn toward or away from life.

Feather Canyon speaks of almost unbearable grief laced with a struggle to understand the strange messages left behind by a beloved spouse.

Confidence Man assures us that encounters with the spirit world can involve a confrontation. The outcome can go in many different directions.

Rebecca Raven tells the reader how love and kindness transits from one world to another, touching a mourning soul with hope.

Ekphrasis relates to how visual art can manifest in spoken or written words, forcing a young artist with her own problems to go against the grain.

Enjoy this, a collection of what will undoubtably be the first of many by a new voice with a dedicated desire to reveal to us the haunting spaces between worlds.

Nancy Kilpatrick

Thrones of Blood author

Montreal 2023

Letters From A Dead World

By the time you read this I'll be dead.

Cendatha-Six has only reached stage one, and hopefully, I can delay stage two a little longer. The others here haven’t been as fortunate as me; by now, they've all kicked the bucket, cashed in their chips, gone belly-up. You get the idea.

As I type this, I’m watching my fingers to make sure I hit the right keys. Truth is, I have no sense of touch anymore. How do I describe it? Numbness would be too kind a term. And my face. Oh, damn, my face. I can no longer look at my reflection. My skin has turned grey, and my eye sockets have darkened, but worst of all is my tongue. It tastes like rotted meat, and when I saw it in the mirror earlier, it looked like a purple slug, slick and glistening, that dangled from my lips.

The parasite fights for control of my mind, its thoughts spreading across my own, and soon, it'll be impossible to tell the difference between the two, like trying to distinguish shadows from substance in the darkness. Once my consciousness is submerged, stage two will begin.

I'm sitting in Colonel Farnsworth's office at Fort Sandleford, a secret defense and research base in the Red Deer River Valley, the heart of the Albertan Badlands. On the desk are piles of Top Secret folders, stuffed with documents written in what my dad would have called acronym-ese if he were still alive.

Since I’m a civilian contractor's son, I shouldn’t be in here. You can only get in through biometric identification, but don’t worry, I’ve got that covered. Farnsworth's severed thumb is tucked safely in my shirt pocket.

Cendatha-Six needs hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, plus fifty-nine other components to survive. Only two things comprise these elements in equal proportion. One of them is dirt. That's why I have sacks of gardening soil piled up on the floor. I've been scooping handfuls of it into my mouth, chasing with water. My life depends on it. You see, unlike the secondary source, dirt is lifeless. It barely nourishes Cendatha-Six, keeping it weak.

I refuse to feed on what it really wants. On my part, that would be an act of self-destruction.

Before I tell you any more about what’s going on, you need to know my background.

My name’s Tony Olsen, the only child of Brad and Leslie Olsen. My dad had served briefly in the armed forces and had been honorably discharged. Afterward, he earned his Master of Science degree in Environmental Science at Cedar Dawn University. He had also met my mother there. As far back as I can remember, my dad had stayed in touch with his buddies in the military. In fact, on the third Monday of every February, he brought my mom and me out to Canadian Forces Base Kensington to celebrate Family Day. There would be face painting, sports, and a big barbecue. The adults would talk grownup stuff amongst themselves and all of us army brats would go off and play together. But most importantly, for me at least, was the father-son bonding tradition that my dad and I shared each year under the supervision of his long-time friend, Major Robert Neville: we would go out to the range and practice shooting live rounds.

I’ll never forget the day when my dad handed me a machine gun for the first time. I was about twelve.

Son, this is your new friend. I’m gonna show you how to fire this baby.

I learned that the weapon was called a C9 LMG. Dad showed me how the ammo box slid underneath and attached to the bottom, then he pointed to the feed tray and the cover and made me practice feeding linked ammo into it.

Pull the ammo slightly outta the box, he insisted, If it ain’t flush and the feed cover ain’t secure, this baby’s gonna jam. Take your time.

I then learned how to aggressively pull the cocking handle back to load the first round into the chamber. He explained how to deal with a gun jam, and how to change