Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 143, No. 1. Whole No. 868, January 2014

Blunt Instruments by James Powell

James Powell is a past winner of the EQMM Readers Award, a recipient of the Arthur Ellis — Canada’s most prestigious mystery-fiction award — and probably the author most often nominated for the latter in the short-story category. His inimitable blend of fantasy, mystery, and humor is particularly well suited to tales set at Christmastime, and he has contributed to many of our holiday issues over the years. This story has in its sights that most iconic of holiday foods, the fruitcake.

The high priest of ancient Egypt’s litter came over a Giza dune. When that dignitary stepped out and saw more of those strange things stretching to the horizon he turned his wondering eyes skyward. Why, by the gods? Why? Well, at least by now he knew what to do with them.

Just as the local Chinese authorities reported, the squarish objects lay as far as the eye could see. General Lo of the Imperial Guard leaned down thoughtfully from his saddle. It was said that when his people met something new their first question was how does it taste. Drawing his sword, he cut off a semi-soft corner of the nearest block, impaled and raised it to his lips. He quickly spat the thing out and looked skyward disapprovingly before galloping off to inform his Imperial master.

One moment the Bishop of Chartres stood brooding before his unfinished cathedral. The next he was surrounded by a caravan of carts and wagons drawn by oxen or peasants from the countryside bearing what would be the first of many loads of construction blocks to finish the great church. He raised his eyes to heaven in thanks for his answered prayers.

On a dull December day, Professor Austin Hobart, his well-worn leather briefcase in a gloved hand, left the University of Toronto School of Architecture and crossed a campus made shabby by gray, week-old snow. As he went he looked skyward. No sign of a white Christmas there. But then he smiled. Nor of baked potatoes either.

Melmoth Hall, his destination, stood quiet, as befits an academic Saturday. Hobart found his younger colleague Roger Ludd’s office door ajar, a sign the man would see students. But as Hobart reached up to knock he heard Ludd’s voice speaking loudly and angrily into the telephone. He stepped back to wait on a bench across the hall.

Hobart had come there on a small matter. During one of his class discussions on roof theory, widow’s walks, and belvederes, a student brought up a legend from her hometown of London, Ontario, that baked potatoes had once come raining down from the sky, her father claiming he had seen them in his youth impaled on the ironwork around their widow’s walk.

Another student suggested she ask Ludd, who was a bit of a campus celebrity as the author of several popular books about similar meteorological phenomena. In another of his attempts to understand his students’ interests, Hobart had recently dipped into Ludd’s latest, Manna From Heaven, lucking into the part where frog’s legs reportedly fell from the sky in France and by chance landed on a frying pan sizzling outdoors, where they hopped about as they cooked, inspiring a new national dish and the dance called the cancan. He found the book of no scholarly value. But since faculty gossip described Ludd as something of a ladies’ man and the student was a pretty thing, Hobart decided he’d better speak to Ludd himself. So here he was in the hall, waiting out the man’s loud conversation.

As a young man, Hobart believed he’d been put on this earth to design great buildings. But during his architectural studies he soon saw he lacked the creative facility for that and had turned to teaching, where he might at least write wise articles shaping architectural thinking, articles that had never come. But he soldiered on, hoping to become an admired mentor and teacher. However, despite his efforts and with only a few years to retirement, he still had difficulty relating to his students.

After a bit Hobart stood up, deciding to come back another day. But just then, with a loud shout of “Bitch!”, Ludd slammed down the phone. So he crossed to the door and knocked.

“Come.” Ludd’s tone implied he expected a student. Nor had he bothered to take the scowl from his face until he saw his visitor. “Ah, Bogart, isn’t it?” he said, for they had met once or twice at faculty get-togethers, and gestured to a chair.

Hobart corrected him on his name and sat down. “I haven’t seen you around much lately,” he offered as a polite conversational opener.

“I don’t get out much these days,” said Ludd, and Hobart thought the man’s eyes strayed to the industrial hard hat on his coat rack. Then Hobart mentioned why he’d come.

Smiling, Ludd asked, “Was there any music?”

Hobart didn’t understand.

“ ‘Let the sky rain potatoes; let it thunder to the tune of “Greensleeves”...’ ” quoted Ludd by way of explanation. “The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act Five, Scene Five,” adding, “Wrong Windsor, I’m afraid.”

Thanking him, Hobart jotted down the Shakespearean reference in his notebook and rose to go.

“You interested in things falling from the sky, then?” wondered Ludd.

“I’m familiar with your work,” said Hobart diplomatically. “But, of course, my field is architecture.”

Ludd brightened. “Even better,” he said, laying his hand on the thick manuscript on a corner of his desk. “My latest.”

Hobart sighed. Clearly the man wanted to talk. Well, Ludd had heard him out about the potatoes. So politeness obliged him to return the courtesy. He sat back down but kept his gloves on to suggest he had business elsewhere. In fact, he was heading home to an empty apartment, his wife having died five years before. Their children were not much for visiting old Dad since then.

Ludd hesitated for a long moment as if unsure where to begin.

Impatient to move things along, Hobart nodded at the phone and then the hallway. “I couldn’t help hearing,” he said. “I take it your latest has been rejected.”

“Transom House loved it,” said Ludd grimly. “My editor’s eager to publish. She only asked me to make one teeny-weeny change. When she told me what it was I absolutely refused.”

“What kind of change?” asked Hobart.

Ludd shook his head. “Maybe I better start at the beginning.”

Hobart groaned inwardly at these words but listened as Ludd began the story of the race of very intelligent creatures who lived a solar system or two away. (He called them “our late cosmic neighbors.”) They valued above all else the time for lofty contemplation. To this end they grew skilled at inventing labor-saving machines. They also simplified their lives by choosing a diet of one single food made from grain, distilled wine, and fruit and nuts. In fact, eventually they were able to bypass agriculture completely by extracting all the necessary ingredients directly from the soil, devising vast automated machines to burrow deep into the earth and extrude just the right amount of nutrition their population required and cut it off into daily blocks.

“Hold it,” laughed Hobart, “those ingredients, it sounds like we’re talking fruitcake here?”

“Right you are,” said Ludd. “And things went well for these people for several centuries on their fruitcake diet and they grew wiser and wiser. Then one day a mechanical malfunction occurred and the machines started producing more blocks than the population required and in a wild variety of sizes. Our neighbors pondered the situation, of course, and decided it was natural for created things to rebel against why their creators had made them. At first this did not seen to be a serious problem. They simply allowed the blocks to dry and used them to cobble their streets and roads and built bridges and things of that sort. But then the overproduction abruptly increased and the surplus food came tumbling out, creating a sudden mountain of blocks drying in front of the entrance to the food-making facility. The bravest among them, which was to say the least wise, scaled this growing obstacle to get to the machine’s controls to correct the problem but lost their lives in the attempt.”

Ludd made a gesture that took in the entire world and said, “This is where we come in. These ingenious people devised space dumpsters to rocket the blocks off to distant corners of their solar system, beyond the pull of their sun’s gravity, where they released their cargoes and came back for more. Other worlds, ours included, have been getting hit with fruitcake meteor showers ever since. The atmosphere softens the damn things, but they harden up soon enough.”

“But how come you know all this?” broke in Hobart again.

“That part was easy,” said Ludd. “In their final days, as the machines ate up their world and spat out fruitcake and their landscape imploded around them, our doomed cosmic neighbors embedded tubes inside the blocks containing messages to warn the universe of the fruitcake menace. At Chartres a mason found one when a block broke open accidentally. Both church and state tried to suppress the information, but clues to it found their way into secret Masonic lore. From that I was able to uncover one of these blocks myself.”

“But how...” protested Hobart.

Ludd anticipated his objection. “How could I read it? The same way the mason did. For simpler folk like us our cosmic neighbors included a decoder ring in each tube.”

Hobart had to smile. Clearly the man was a harmless crackpot. If his book ever was published he’d be laughed off the face of the earth. “Come on, a decoder ring?” he scoffed.

“I know, I know. It sounds crazy,” admitted Ludd. “Look, I guess word leaked out about the decoder ring somewhere along the way. I’ll bet those radio people got wind of it, the ones who wrote that late-afternoon adventure series for kids, the one about the boy who could cloud his parents’ minds so that they couldn’t see him. You know, the one whose loyal listeners could send in for decoder rings and get secret messages from the show? What was that show called? It was way before my time.”

“The Five O’Clock Shadow,” supplied Hobart.

“You’ve got it,” said Ludd, adding, “Anyway, we’re still getting hit by fruitcake and coming up with ways to get rid of the damn things. Even Canada got into the act. Think about the Empire State Building.” He tapped his manuscript again. “The Gemini meteor showers favor the northern hemisphere in late December. I’ve gotten hints there was a big one in the Hudson Bay area in the early nineteen twenties. Don’t forget the Scarlet Hernia epidemic.”

Hobart cocked an eye. What Canadian could? Back then the Royal Canadian Mounted Police came down with a strange limp. The official explanation was something to do with some defect in the latest batch of corduroy breeks. But other stories going around spoke of mysterious sealed railway cars loaded in secret by masked men in scarlet coats coming down from Hudson Bay carrying no one knew what.

“Some say those trains were bringing arctic ice to fill a sudden shortage for New York City Christmas office party drinks,” said Ludd, shaking his head. “I say fruitcake. To build the Empire State Building.”

Ludd stood up, reached around with both hands, and lifted a gray, oblong object down from a high shelf on the bookcase behind him. “And here’s another of those blocks, this one with the message tube and decoder ring still inside. I know. I’ve had it X-rayed. When my book is published, and it will be, Transom House be damned, I’m going to crack this thing open on live television for all to see. That should get book sales jumping.” Ludd thumped the block down on his desk.

Suddenly Hobart wasn’t laughing anymore. The block indeed gave off the ghost of an odor he’d smelled before and it brought back boyhood memories. Back during World War Two, his father away in the army and his mother working long shifts in a defense factory in Toronto, young Hobart had been sent to live with his grandparents in a small town in southern Ontario, a hamlet actually, one too small to have a mayor. His grandfather was reeve, elected by the other councilmen. In a distant corner of his grandfather’s garden was a large hole around which these councilmen and his grandfather gathered in the fall in what looked like some kind of ceremony and gazed down into the hole’s considerable depths. Once, when out of curiosity Hobart approached the hole, his grandfather warned him off, afraid, the boy assumed, he’d go too close to the edge and fall in. But he remembered from that quick visit this same fruitcake smell.

And there was more. A town Christmas was impressive for a boy from a big, anonymous city. On the eve itself a horse-drawn sleigh decorated with bells with his grandfather at the reins disguised in a beard, Santa costume, and many-pillowed belly (Hobart had heard him practicing his ho-ho-hos) led the parade, escorted by the councilmen in elf hats. Carolers singing songs of the season followed next. Afterward the carolers would continue up and down the streets of town.

Later that night, noises in the dark street brought Hobart to the window in his little attic bedroom and he saw the sleigh, now without bells, and his grandfather, minus beard and belly, and the elves, all wearing pillows tied to their heads with scarves, turn into the alley beside the house. As they passed under the streetlight he thought he saw some kind of blocks and a tangle of what looked like several arms and legs in the back of the sleigh.

Next day, the talk around the breakfast table centered on the disappearance of two of the carolers, the town postmaster and schoolteacher who sang baritone and soprano in their church choir. They had, it seemed, chosen Christmas Eve to run off together to the States, probably Saginaw, Michigan, the usual destination of such happenings in those parts.

A day or so later, Hobart noticed the postmaster’s little dog hanging around the hole in the yard until his grandfather drove him off.

Hobart hadn’t understood then. Now he thought he did. And it might explain Ludd’s hard hat too. But hoping he might be wrong, he said, “But with all that falling fruitcake people could have been killed.”

“Many were,” Ludd replied, tapping the block. “Our cosmic neighbors here were sorry about that. As best I could decode their message they said, ‘Hey, fruitcake happens.’

“To protect themselves,” he continued, “wiser worlds than ours started patrolling their skies with saucerlike vehicles to catch incoming fruitcake and spin them back into space. I even suspect the more compassionate among them sometimes may have patrolled our skies too.”

Wild as it was, Hobart suddenly believed what Ludd was saying. But he tried once more, hoping the man would deny this absurd, this hideous truth. “Are you telling me that the Pyramids at Giza, the Great Wall of China, and Chartres Cathedral were merely our way of disposing of stale fruitcake from outer space?”

“Bingo,” said Ludd. “But call it what you like. I say getting rid of evidence. And, hey, did you never wonder why there is no hieroglyph in ancient Egyptian for ‘fruitcake’ or ideogram for it in Chinese or no word for it in French? The best they can do is Bûche de Noël Anglaise. And by the way, in Spanish fruitcake’s ‘adobe’.”

Sensing from Hobart’s face that he’d made a convert, Ludd continued earnestly, “Why, you ask, didn’t we hear about all the people killed over the centuries by falling fruitcake? Because the powers-that-be have hushed it up. They’d say if people knew they’d run panicking in the streets. But the most important thing was that this knowledge gave them a handle on power. Now they could say, We know something too terrible for the masses to know and that gives us the right to tell them what to do.

“Think about how fruitcake has shaped modern life,” he said. “Like television. A whole civilization sitting around watching a box with a screen on it. It’s all about keeping us inside. Shopping malls are the same thing. Get ’em under roof where they can’t be hit by falling fruitcake going from store to store.”

Ludd shook his head. “Well, you can’t run democratic governments like that. No sir! We are adults. We’ve got to face up to the truth. And I’m the boy to lead the way.”

Now he looked at Hobart and confided, “Look, call me crazy, but I’ve always had this feeling that I’ve been put here for a purpose bigger than myself. Writing this book I decided, damn it, this was why!”

For a brief moment Hobart actually found himself envying the man, having had that same special feeling of purpose himself so very long ago. Now all of a sudden it sprang up inside him again. No, he realized, he couldn’t let this man reduce the meaning of life to keeping out of the way of falling fruitcake and disposing of the evidence. All the finest artistic achievements and monuments of human endeavor mustn’t become some kind of fruitcake absurdity. Poor Ludd was a lunatic who had lucked upon a terrible truth. But one he could not be allowed to make public. No, his book must never be published. Strange how things work out. The man who believes he’s been put here to reveal this terrible secret meets up with the man who now knows that his mission in life had always been to make sure that it wasn’t.

Hobart knew he had to act quickly. But how? Then it came to him. “May I look?” he asked, nodding at the petrified fruitcake. When Ludd nodded back Hobart picked up the block in his gloved hands and carried it over to the window next to the bookcase as if to examine it in the daylight.

As he did, Ludd said, “Hey, back there you asked what itsy-bitsy change my Transom House editor wanted. Well, get this. She’s a vegetarian. She saw fruitcake from outer space as an attack on her core beliefs. So no fruitcake. She wanted me to make it guess what? Meatloaf. Meatloaf! Give me a break. No, she won’t be publishing my book. But somebody else sure will. And it will blow the lid off the biggest secret in the history of the world.”

Ludd was directing all of his resentment at the telephone now. Hobart wished there was another way to stop him from publishing his damned book. But he knew there wasn’t. Uttering a prayer for both their souls, he raised the fruitcake shoulder high and brought it down hard on the man’s head. Ludd fell forward across his desk.

The fruitcake broke in half with the blow. The pieces dropped to the floor and out popped a metal tube. Hobart shoved the tube and Ludd’s manuscript into his briefcase. Then he left the office, giving one last glance back at Ludd’s body. Maybe the authorities would think Ludd had been killed when something like traffic vibrations had inched the block forward until it finally fell from its high shelf. Then he left the office, closing the door firmly behind him to spare any student the shock of discovering the body.

Hobart started on his walk home at his usual pace, glad for the time to think things out. Then he looked up at the sky, quickened his step, and wished he’d brought Ludd’s hard hat.

Terrible as it was to kill a man, he knew he’d done the right thing. When spring came and made the ground diggable, he would bury the tube and Ludd’s manuscript in some deep out-of-the-way hole in his grandfather’s memory. The thought made him remember something his grandmother had once told him way back then. With a nod at the hole at the end of the garden she said, “Your grandfather’s a wise man. He thinks ahead.” She meant, he now understood, that he’d dug his hole before winter and the fruitcakes came. It seemed ironic now, for later his grandfather had been replaced as reeve by a young newcomer to town who built a fallout shelter large enough to hold all the council members and their wives. Hobart wondered if fallout was a code word for fruitcake.

Anyway, he knew he’d done the right thing. What really bothered him was that long ago he thought he’d been put here for some high artistic purpose. Not to kill some poor sap who’d lucked onto a terrible truth. No, he didn’t like that part of it. And this reminded him of what their late cosmic neighbors had said about those malfunctioning fruitcake machines, how it was the natural tendency of created things to rebel against their creators. Well, Hobart damn well knew if he’d been created for a lifetime of grinding out fruitcake he’d have rebelled too. Here was something more for him to think about during the long, cold winter ahead. He might even read over Ludd’s manuscript and translate the tube. Yes, and he might even find himself thinking clearer with the decoder ring on his finger.

When Hobart reached the door of his apartment building he turned back for a moment. “Look out, world,” he warned the horizon. “Maybe fruitcake does happen.”