Hell of a Band: Twelve Fantasy Stories

By David H. Hendrickson

From dragons to retirement homes…

From music to email Spam…

From Africa to the Garden of Eden…

From the comic to the deadly serious.

Award-winning master of the fantastic David H. Hendrickson spins spellbinding tales wherever he looks…

and these twelve stories prove it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David H. Hendrickson
• Release date: Jan 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393102304

Book preview

Hell of a Band

Hell of a Band

Twelve Fantasy Stories

David H. Hendrickson

Pentucket Publishing

Contents

Introduction

Makonde Tree of Life

Just Stop It!

Blue Note Heaven

A Pathetic Excuse for a Dragon

Back to the Garden

Drawing Dead

All Over Again

The Kids Keep Coming

Dragon Jet Propulsion

You Know We’ve Got a Hell of a Band

Little Blue Fuzzy

Truth and Lies

Also by David H. Hendrickson

Acknowledgments

About the Author

To Jeanne Cavelos,

whose Odyssey Workshop helped me believe,

at the most important time possible,

that the only person who could stop me was me.

Introduction

It does seem odd that it’s taken this long—my fourth short story collection—for me to release one that’s exclusively fantasy. After all, my inspiration to write came from Harlan Ellison, arguably the greatest fantasist of all time. And for countless years, I tried to emulate his writing.

Yet Shimmers and Laughs: Eight Wildly Hilarious Tales came first. Then Death in the Serengeti and Other Stories: Ten Tales of Crime. And most recently, The Boy in the Boxers and Other Stories of Sweet Romance.

Humor, crime, and romance. Where’s the fantasy?

I guess it all boils down to me writing stories all over the map. I’m here, there, and everywhere. In fact, even my fantasies are all over the map. This collection includes two dragon stories, a Biblical fantasy about the Garden of Eden, several afterlife stories that are most definitely not Biblical, a Young Adult fantasy, and multiple stories about growing old. From high fantasy to Twilight Zone-style tales. From the comic to the very, very serious.

Good grief! Could we have just a little bit of consistency?

Sorry, not going to happen. It’s just the way my creative brain works. (Or doesn’t work, depending on your perspective.)

Perhaps I should invoke Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. However, even I have to admit that my scattershot creative mind makes it harder to market my work. It’d be a whole lot easier if my creative compass pointed to its true north and stayed there, for crying out loud, instead of its needle spinning wildly about until finally it’s just a blur.

When you bounce from humor to noir (pretty much opposite ends of the spectrum), and from sweet romance to crime (at least in some respects, opposite ends of the spectrum), and from squeaky clean Young Adult to hockey romances containing spicy scenes (aka the good parts), it makes it harder for readers to find you.

Oh, well. In the words of that famous philosopher, Popeye, I yam what I yam.

All I can do is let my oddball creative mind take me wherever it goes, and thank you, my loyal reader, for finding me there.

—David H. Hendrickson

August 15, 2020

Makonde Tree of Life

Introduction to Makonde Tree of Life

Often, the best fiction comes not from a single idea but rather two of them interwoven in such a way that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. I’m not going to claim that this story falls into the best fiction category, but it does come from two near-obsessions of mine.

I live a very busy life, sometimes absurdly so, but I still meet my ninety-two-year-old mother for dinner every week. It’s important to me. She won’t be with me forever.

In fact, as her short-term memory issues worsen, I wonder how much longer my real Mom will be with us. She’s trying valiantly to hold on, and I love her for that (and for so many other reasons, of course). At some point, however, her body may remain, doing surprisingly well for someone nearing the century mark, but her mind may someday no longer even recognize me.

As a result, I’ve found myself writing more and more stories about aging. Perhaps it’s not yet an obsession, but it’s getting close.

A much happier near-obsession of mine stems from my trip of a lifetime to Africa. It led to me writing Death in the Serengeti, which won the Derringer Best Long Story Award in 2018, and also was reprinted in Best American Mystery Stories 2018. Those two achievements fulfilled lifelong writing dreams of mine. My time in Tanzania and Rwanda also led directly to my hockey romance novel, No Defense. (Yes, a hockey romance set in Africa. If you don’t believe me, check it out and see for yourself.)

Comparing Tanzania and Rwanda to everyday, humdrum life isn’t a fair comparison, of course. It’s an elephant versus a mosquito. A rhino versus washing the dishes. The Serengeti versus an asphalt parking lot.

And when your everyday, humdrum life consists of watching Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy in a retirement home, as is the case for Edith in this story, the lure of Africa becomes even more overpowering.

Perhaps too overpowering.

Makonde Tree of Life

Edith had forgotten about the ebony wood carving George bought while they were on the African safari. But she forgot about a lot of things these days.

He’d arranged to have it shipped home from Tanzania—the shipping had cost even more than the five-hundred-dollar cost of the admittedly exquisite piece—but he’d suffered a fatal heart attack within a week of their return, two weeks before the package arrived. So she’d tearfully stuffed the unopened two-by-four-foot package marked FRAGILE! GLASS! (even though there wasn’t a sliver of glass in the wooden carving) in the back of the bedroom closet, and when she sold their Colonial and moved into an apartment at Bountiful Sunsets retirement home, the still-unopened package went from the back of one closet to the back of another.

It sat there for year after year, tucked behind all the dress clothes Edith never wore anymore but didn’t have the heart to throw out. She knew she ought to donate them all to Goodwill or the Salvation Army; the whole lot of them smelled faintly of mothballs. But they were memories of better days, days full of bustling activity, things to do, places to go, and people to meet. Always a need to look at her best, standing next to George with a smile on her face.

Now, she had this nice apartment with a full kitchen, a front room with a TV and a DVR that someone had actually programmed for her, and a carpeted bedroom with a desk, dresser, and a spacious closet.

But to what end?

It didn’t matter whether she was dressed to the nines or just wearing her plain white cotton pajamas, as plain as plain can be, as she sat there watching Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy.

Who cared? Nobody.

There had been a time when she’d dressed up for Pat Sajak and Vanna as she watched Wheel of Fortune, welcoming them into her home (even though, of course, she knew they couldn’t see her), and she changed into a different, even classier outfit for Alex Trebek and Jeopardy, which aired in the following half hour. She’d eagerly blurt out her answers; she was good.

Not anymore. Now she just watched in her plain white PJs, even putting her feet up on the coffee table. She hardly got any Jeopardy questions right or filled in the blanks correctly on Wheel of Fortune to spell out the answer. She’d even begun to record Jeopardy and re-watch it the next day, sometimes two, three, and four times.

But she still couldn’t get the answers right. How could she be watching a fourth time in twenty-four hours—and really paying attention—and not know the answers?

It was awful.

So it was no surprise that she’d forgotten about George’s package, hidden in the back of the closet. But when she saw it—after tripping on the carpet outside the closet, falling down and almost smacking her head on it—it seemed high time to open the damned thing up.

When she pulled the carving out of the package and set it in the middle of her desk, it almost took her breath away. And not just because it reminded her of how much George had loved the piece. Circular and about two feet tall and eight inches wide, the Makonde Tree of Life included seven levels of three-inch high figures, two men and two women at each level, their arms interwoven as if they were dancing, each level of four intricately carved figures standing on top of the one below, symbolizing each generation resting atop its predecessors.

It was beautiful. No wonder George had loved it. He so would have enjoyed it in their home had it arrived before his demise.

Edith ran her hand softly along the middle level, stroking the carved, ebony face of the nearest male figure as if it were George himself.

And with only a split second warning, her body was sucked out of the room.

Edith sensed the water, fetid and swamp-like, though moving lazily past, an instant before she went under. Down she went, with almost no air in her lungs. She opened her eyes, blinking, disbelieving. Was about to open her mouth for a panicked gulp of air even as she knew she was now two or three feet below. Four or five. Six. Saw only a greenish-brown, silty cloud and large, cow-sized, four-legged creatures thrashing about in the same state of panic she felt.

She touched the squishy bottom, for a second felt herself getting sucked down into it, half of her ankle submerged and embedded and then all of it, the muck inching up her leg, prompting an instinctive scream she only held back by the barest of margins.

But then she touched a hard bottom. Wiggling loose of the muck, staring wild-eyed through the green-brown, pea-soup-thick silt, trying to make sense of what had become of her, Edith pushed off the bottom and shot to the surface.

She broke through an instant before her lungs could hold out no longer and took an agonized gasp of air. She bobbed for a second at the surface, her legs kicking furiously, and then the stench hit her like a hard, wet slap across the face. The coppery smell of blood and death and rotting carcasses filled her nostrils. An instant later, one of the four-legged beasts—a wide-eyed wildebeest, its flank the distinctive stripes of brown and black, all of six hundred pounds while rising five feet high, not even counting the neck and head—rose somehow out of the water and toppled over, slamming against Edith, driving her down with it back below the surface.

Edith flailed even as the wildebeest kicked its mighty legs, once striking her in the right thigh, sending a shooting pain up and down the leg. Only then did she see the massive crocodile, easily fifteen feet long if not twenty, a giant weighing in at perhaps two tons. This was what had propelled the wildebeest up out of the water before dragging it back down now, its jaws clamped tight about the wildebeest’s snout.

Wildly, Edith pushed away from the thrashing beast. She stared at its panicked eyes, eyes that told of the wildebeest's instinctive knowledge of its impending death. And though her own fear was almost every bit as palpable, she instinctively reached out to the dying creature, as if any gesture of sympathy or comfort she could offer would help it even as the crocodile dragged it down to drown it.

Edith’s head broke above the water’s surface a second time. Below her, the two giant creatures thrashed, the water a bubbling maelstrom of death. In front of her, less than twenty feet away, more wildebeests and a few braying zebras stampeded across the river, the column of them seven or eight wide, forced ahead by more of their kind behind them pushing them onward even into their deaths, the parade stretching to the far bank and its sandy slope upward to the plains eight or ten feet above. From the opposite bank, more crocodiles left their sunny, sandy banks, sliding into the waters for their next meal.

And as Edith swam away from them toward the far shore with young, strong arms, she realized with amazement that she was viewing the Great Migration, one of the great wonders of the world in which almost two million wildebeests, zebras, and other creatures migrated from the southern Serengeti up to this northern part—this must be the Mare River—where the creatures would cross from Tanzania into Kenya.

She and George had been too early for the Great Migration. Impossible to time precisely, they’d missed it by three weeks, a great disappointment to both of them.

Well, she was seeing it now, far more up close and personal than she had ever wished.

Behind her, a single cloven hoof broke through the water, and then another and another,