KEEP PLANNING – Perry Ruhland

He told her in the dark: “Burn the lot, then I’ll give you the papers,” and for a time after, life continued without incident. He stopped by Breit’s each evening and sat in the corner. With an emptied glass he watched the silent television hung behind the bar, all scoreboards and shifting faces. Then, when the thought had nearly left him: aerial footage of cars engulfed in flame. The fire spread across the cramped rows of hollow cars and glowed pure white in the grainy video. Little firemen in model trucks failed to contain the blaze. The ticker read: AUTOYARD INFERNO. So Martin waits in the shadows of an olive grove. One hand holds a cigarette and the other a black valise. The sky is dark and moonless but his sedan is running and its headlamps cast golden light down the thick trees ahead. The trees arch, twist, and splinter. Martin sees in their trunks the suggestions of arteries and bones. Looking at them too closely hurts his back. When his cigarette is finished, he stubs it in the dirt with the others and lights one more. From the dark comes a series of steady footfalls. “Jessica,” he says. But a chalky man emerges. He’s gangly but not tall in an ill-fit suit. His face is oblong, drawn, eyes sunken and little hair left on the scalp. The chalky man stops by the trunk of the sedan. Martin sees his suit is dark and stained. His shoes are caked in mud. His tie, loosely knotted, is a pillar of ash. “Can I help you,” Martin says. The man rolls his neck, cracking vertebrae. He attempts a smile. “Jessica told me to tell you she can’t make it.” A voice like dead leaves. “She broke her leg. She’s stuck in bed.” Martin thinks of the precision rifle laid across the backseat of the sedan and the box of .30-06 cartridges beside it. “I don’t know her.” “I’m the nephew -- her brother’s son.” Martin decides to finish his cigarette. Through coiled smoke he looks for a resemblance in the black veined eyes, white lips. Finds nothing. “She did something very dangerous for you and she was hurt. Just because she was hurt doesn’t mean she won’t get her payment. That’s why she asked me to take you to her.” “Take me to her.” “Down a trail of purple flowers. Right over there.” The chalky man points to the dark from which he came. At night’s threshold, there are, in fact, little purple flowers growing from matted grass. Martin imagines them winding like a river of stars through the sky. “Okay,” he says and tightens his grip on the valise. The chalky man smiles. “Okay,” goes that awful voice. “Follow me.” The chalky man turns on his heel. He begins to walk from the sedan towards the flowers. With four great and silent strides Martin is behind him. He raises the valise and brings it down on the chalky man’s head. With a crack the man goes limp and falls into the dark. Martin places the valise on his passenger seat. The edge of the valise is wet with blood. He moves the rifle and shells beside it. By the ankles, the chalky man is dragged into light. A wet crater marks his crown. Martin binds his wrists and ankles. He strains to lift the chalky man over a shoulder. He feels a faint trace of heartbeat. The chalky man is deposited in the back seat. Martin pulls his jaw down. A cavern of white gums and yellow teeth from which cigarette-stench wafts freely. Martin undoes the loose tie and gags him with it. When he shuts the back door the man falls against the window and trails black blood on the glass. To avoid detection, Martin drives the sedan down a series of side streets, dirt paths, and barely-roads. In the forest the headlights illuminate old matted tire tracks and wring brutal shadows from overhead boughs. The chalky man sits still in the rearview mirror except for his head bobbing against the window and smearing blood. A roar builds in the night. Although it’s still miles away, Martin sees the great sheet waterfall charging into the river. He sees, too, the little wooden shack. The two landmarks hang suspended in negative space behind his eyes. When the roar grows louder he sees the land between them. Martin stops the car beside the shack. He takes a thin flashlight from the glovebox. Outside, he crushes the end of his last cigarette between shoe and stony earth. The wind rolls across the river through the trees and cools the sweat on his neck. Inside the ten-by-ten room of the crummy wooden shack there are no windows, only a dirty cot, a decomposing chair, and a bookcase whose three shelves are full of hardbound books and tattered issues of National Geographic. Martin shines the flashlight above the bookcase. A torn picture is nailed to the wall. The picture shows a face carved in stone, draped by thick brown roots. He takes from the bookcase the hardcover Comprehensive History of Western Dental Hygiene and withdraws an automatic pistol from its hollow. Aiming the pistol with one hand, Martin opens the back door of the sedan, and the chalky man falls heavy onto the earth. The head wound has grown and his hands have turned blue. Martin presses the pistol against the bloody scalp and, reaching under his grubby shirt, feels for a heartbeat. There is none. He feels, too, for a pulse in the hollow of his neck and the underside of a wrist. He curses. The trunk contains three hammers of varying sizes, a shovel, a handsaw, folded plastic sheets, a carton of two inch nails, pliers, more cartons of .30-06, and a bundle of zip-ties. Martin would bury the body behind the shack, but the earth is too dense. He could cut the body up and wrap each piece in plastic before dropping them in the river, but he sees in the morning the body parts rushing downriver, bobbing like ducks beneath a quaint stone bridge. There is no need for hammers or nails. Putting the automatic pistol in the band of his pants, with a hand gripping the stained suit collar, Martin drags the chalky corpse across the earth. The white socks on the bound feet rip on jagged stones. In the cabin, he props the corpse up on the chair. It slumps in the seat like a sad pierrot. The flashlight’s wan glow reveals the dead man’s final expression. The knot of the gag is dark with saliva. Martin shuts the cabin door with him and the corpse inside. He turns to the bookcase. He surveys the faded spines of the many volumes. Eventually he selects a history of a not-distant war. With the book spread across his lap he shines the light on passages at random. Mouthing the words: Following a series of defeats in the steppe and on the heels of our camp's dramatic obliteration, our commanding officer made the difficult decision to establish a base within the walls of the concrete castle, he sags against the wall. The castle in the mountains was of obscure religious significance. The commanding officer believed the enemy wouldn’t dare attack due to shared heritage, and perhaps more obscure reasons. The portcullis was down but the castle was entered via a passage in the dry moat. The soldiers moved through the barren halls to the inner sanctum. The sanctum was empty, but at one point it had held a dozen black sarcophagi. Reading this, Martin looks from the page and meets the chalky corpse’s gaze. Its eyes are now open. Black veins glint in the electric light. Martin removes the gag from the corpse’s mouth and undoes the knot. His hands wet from the dead man’s saliva. With the gray (now in places black) tie untied he wraps it around the corpse’s eyes and reties it as a blindfold. The unit of eight set up base camp in the inner sanctum. They established posts on the outer walls. Days passed without any sign of the enemy, but turmoil mounted within. One of the soldiers was an educated man and refused to enter the chamber. He walked the halls at all hours with his rifle. One of the soldiers was a poet and spoke of bright purple holes in his sleep. The commanding officer fell down the stairs and broke his leg. When the enemy attacked the castle with mortars and light aircraft, the unit was decimated. Invaders strode through the crumbled outer wall and the narrator retreated to the inner sanctum. There twelve black sarcophagi, relics sculpted by long-dead hands, stood against the walls as if they had been moved in the commotion. So ends the brief account. He re-reads it from the start. The room smells sour. Again the castle falls and the sarcophagi appear as if they had been moved in the commotion. The book is closed and the light turned off. Martin shuts his eyes. The temperature rises. Martin opens his eyes to see black moons shining in the dark. The blindfold has fallen from the corpse staring at him. The stench fills the space entirely. This little wooden shack is too small for a man and a corpse. Martin steps out into the night where the air is cool and smells of pine. The moonless sky is textured with broken constellations. Wind blows off the river. He walks in its direction. The canopied forest is an abyss best navigated by the sound of water. Martin trips on roots. Golden eyes track his movement. Beyond the trees, the shifting crests of the river’s current catch a little starlight. The river thunders through the wilderness. At the shore, he gets on his stomach, and with cupped hands he drinks the cool water. He splashes another handful on his face. The taste and feel of the water, and the smell of the air grants the dark a gentle navy hue. Refreshed, Martin returns to his feet and works his way to a large boulder just beside the shore. He sits against it, the back of his head flush besides a smooth indentation. Now when he closes his eyes, he feels the breeze, the droplets on his chin, the cushion of cold earth. Martin feels sleep’s approach. He notices his thoughts become liquid, scenes from the day and the book and odd phantoms of the unconscious bubbling together. It won’t do. He punches his thigh, faces the night. If only I had a smoke, he thinks, and plays with his lighter just because. To fend off sleep, Martin dunks his head in the river for the second time. When he was a boy, Martin lived in a small house in the woods by a large and quiet pond. Every day he’d play by the water, skipping rocks or wading in or sitting on the shore trying to catch a fish. One summer, he walked to the center of the pond where the sun reflected as liquid gold. Something grabbed at his feet and he fell beneath the surface. He almost drowned. Smooth rocks lie at the river’s edge. Martin finds a flat one, triangular with rounded edges. He grips it between his thumb and ring finger, index finger curled around its side. He flicks his arm back a few times, thinking of the rock skipping across the water and the sun burning in a blue sky. But it’s still night, and when he throws the stone it’s momentarily pale before his eyes and then gone in the dark, any sign of its landing lost behind the water’s roar. Martin hadn’t considered this. He wonders if it skipped, and decides it did. Martin leaves the river and heads back the way he came. He walks into the forest in what he assumes is the direction he set out before. Navigating now by flashlight, Martin avoids tripping over roots, but is watched from shadows still. He finds tiny, red mushrooms and slick growths of moss. He spots an owl in a tree. The wind blows strong against his back. Light glows in the distance. He turns off the flashlight and ducks behind a tree. The clearing and the shack are straight ahead. Outside the shack, the doors of his sedan are open and the interior light spills onto stony earth and weeds. Gun in hand, Martin presses himself against the entrance to the shack. He feels his heart thunder and a burning in his neck. He opens the door and steps inside. The gun points at nothing. The shack has a dirty cot, a decomposing chair, and a bookcase whose contents are in disarray. There should be a corpse on the chair but there isn’t. Martin turns to the car. Through the windshield he can find neither the bloodied briefcase nor his precision rifle. Their absence punches a hole through the scene and through its aperture Martin sees the gun, the briefcase, and the corpse somewhere in the dark. The chalky man sits in his ruined suit balancing the rifle on his knees. A garden of scabs have grown from his head wound and a deep blue hand grips the foreguard. One black eye is closed while the other rests unblinking behind the scope. A bloodless finger tests a trigger. Martin slams the door closed behind him. He drops the pistol on the cot besides the history of the not-distant war. Every hardcover book and issue of National Geographic is pulled from the bookcase and the bookcase is pushed against the door. The cot is upended, book and gun tumbling onto wood, then pushed against the bookcase. The chair is pushed against the cot for good measure. Martin sits with his back against the wall, head low below the stone face staring blankly at the door. In the silent dark, Martin is robbed of space and sound. His body disarticulates into a collection of parts. He feels with great specificity the dimensions of his stomach, lungs, and small intestine. His eyes, unseeing, take up great space in his skull; his mouth drips saliva. Groping in the dark, he finds the gun amidst the books. He presses the receiver against his cheek. I only have to wait ‘til morning, Martin thinks, but there are no windows to let in the sun. Dawn breaks across thatched roofs and gables. A cock cries. Walls are washed in red and gold. Behind the church and neat churchyard, a stone bridge crosses a river. Beneath the bridge and wrapped in plastic: hands, legs, a jaw.

*** Perry Ruhland is a writer based in Chicago. His writing has previously been published in Baffling Magazine, Vastarien Magazine, Weird Horror Magazine, and ergot.press. 20 September 2025