The Devil Still Has My Lawnmower & Other Tales of the Weird

  * * *

  A week later, Lou was still missing, and Alan's own lawn was now starting to look like it needed attention. Alan knocked on Lou's door, and was treated with the same silence he had experienced the weekend before. Nothing seemed to have changed, except a notice from the Homeowner's Association taped to Lou's door notifying him that if he didn't mow his lawn soon, he would be faced with a fine.

  Alan turned around. Lou's lawn was still unmowed, and in fact, since it had been a week, was now even worse. He went back to his house and woke up his wife.

  “Dear,” he said, “have you seen our neighbor?”

  “Lou?” asked Betsey. She was still groggy with sleep, and rolled over to rub her eyes in protest of the unwelcome consciousness.

  “Yes,” said Alan. “I think something might have happened to him. I haven't seen him since I loaned him my lawnmower.”

  Betsey frowned. “I told you not to loan out our tools. I told you. Our yard has to be done this week, or we'll get fined. You should call him.”

  “I've tried. He didn't answer. He also didn't finish. His lawn is still terrible.”

  “Well, that's not our fault,” said Betsey. “Get our lawnmower back. Thomas needs to do some yard work if he's going to get an allowance from us this week. Maybe Lou's at work.”

  “Where does he work?” asked Alan. It occurred to him that while Lou had lived next door to him for nearly two years, he knew very little about him, save the fact that he was polite, handsome, and seemed far too young to own his own house. Shouldn’t he at least know what Lou does for a living? “Do you know?” he asked Betsey.

  “Some office on... Oh, I don't know, I think it's on Seventh Street next to the behavioral therapist that we took Thomas to that one time,” she said. “The one with the ugly architecture.”

  “All right,” said Alan. “I'll check it out.”

  Alan knew right away when he had found it. While the surrounding buildings were easy to look at with a pleasing desert motif, this one was painted a bright, obnoxious red. Alan walked up to the building and paused at the glass door, chuckling at the address printed on it: six sixty-sixty, Seventh Street.

  He went inside. The lobby was completely and alarmingly bare. There wasn't even any furniture to sit down in while waiting to be seen: Just a single desk and a single chair, occupied by a single receptionist.

  The room was red. The desk was red. The paintings hanging on the walls had red frames and held nothing but canvases painted solid red. The receptionist had red hair, and was even wearing a red dress and a pair of red glasses. No matter which direction he turned, Alan was reminded of flames. He felt like he had walked into a kiln.

  He walked up to address the receptionist. “Um, hello,” he said.

  The receptionist responded with burning silence.

  “I'm here... um...” Alan continued. The receptionist pursed her cherry-red lips and her thin red eyebrows started to sink into a frown. “My neighbor works here. I just wanted to see if I could talk to him. He's borrowed something of mine, and I haven't seen him.”

  “If he does work here,” said the receptionist rudely, “and it's doubtful, I promise, then you can't see him because he's busy.”

  “Um...” said Alan, “Well, I need to see him. It's kind of urgent.”

  “We're all busy,” said the receptionist. “We have a deadline we're trying to make with the firm on seven seventy-seven, Sixth Street.”

  Alan could not remember anything about the office complexes on Sixth Street as he passed them by on the way over, other than the fact that the buildings were all painted blindingly white.

  “His name is Lou,” said Alan.

  “Definitely not someone who works here,” said the receptionist.

  Alan hung his head forlornly, and reached into his pocket for his car keys. He felt something in his pocket that he was sure he hadn't put there. He pulled it out. It was a folded piece of paper: the contract that Lou had signed a week prior, stating that he promised to return Alan's lawnmower.

  Alan handed the paper over to the receptionist. “He gave me this,” he said. “Do you recognize the signature?”

  For a moment the receptionist did nothing, but eventually she reached out and snatched the paper from his hands. With complete disregard for the condition of the document, she unfolded it roughly, read the first few lines, and let loose an unearthly shriek of terror that no human had ever had the misfortune of witnessing before.

  It was like the sound of a thousand damned souls crying from the very bowels of Hell in simultaneous and incalculable surprise. It was over in an instant, but in that small moment Alan's mind felt like it had been dragged across hot coals and lashed with whips. Alan jumped two feet in the air from the sound of the sickening noise, and stared at the receptionist in sheer astonishment. She still had the document in hand, but her eyes were darting back and forth across the page in excitement. Something was bathing her face in light, and it took a few moments for Alan to realize that the light was coming from the contract itself.

  The receptionist snapped her head up. Tears were building in her eyes and threatened to rain down. “Where did you get this?” she asked. Her voice was a strange cross of hopefulness and desperation. Alan, still thoroughly perturbed by the shriek, found the receptionist’s question odder still: it was just the written promise to return a lawnmower, yet she was treating it like it was the salvation of the damned.

  “I told you,” sputtered Alan, searching for some trace of normalcy in the conversation. “I got it from my neighbor, Lou. I loaned him my lawnmower, and he promised to return it. In writing.”

  “Lou?” asked the secretary. “Why do you call him Lou?”

  “That's his name,” said Alan with a shrug.

  The secretary got up out of her seat. There was a brightness in her eyes, and it wasn't a figurative one. They burned with the intensity of exploding stars. Alan thought he might go blind. “Well, your neighbor is not named Lou,” the secretary said fiercely. “He is Lucifer, the First Fallen, the Last Saved. He is the Prince of Darkness, the Father of Lies, and the ruler of Hell! Your neighbor, sir, is the Devil!”

  Alan stood his ground. He thought about Lou, how he seemed so young and so successful. He remembered the tall man with the fake skin and the Hugo Boss suit, and the swarm of bees that could talk, and the fact that Lou had vanished without a trace and had taken Alan's lawnmower with him. And for these reasons, Alan thought, it made absolute, one hundred percent, perfect sense that his neighbor, Lou, was actually Lucifer, the Devil, the Prince of Darkness.

  Even so, there was a lawnmower at stake, and he had to get it back, or face the Homeowner’s Association.

  Alan put his hands on his hips. “Well,” he said authoritatively, “I'll have you know, ma'am, that the Devil still has my lawnmower.”

  In response, the receptionist escorted Alan to an elevator that revealed itself when a regular-looking bit of red wall slid away. The secretary shoved him in roughly, and glowered at him. “Please hurry up,” she said. “We're almost done preparing.”

  “What for?” asked Alan.

  The receptionist just smiled, reached into the elevator, pressed a button, and the elevator door closed.

  The elevator was also red. It had two red buttons, oriented vertically, without labels. The elevator only stopped two places, it seemed:

  On the top floor.

  And on the bottom one.

  After the door closed, and the elevator started its descent.

  It seemed to take hours. No fewer than ten times did it seem like the elevator would finally stop, only to accelerate again.

  Alan realized that he wasn’t particularly concerned that he was descending into Hell. He was more worried that he’d be rocked to sleep like a baby. He wondered how many other people had gotten to ride it. He pondered the logistics and practicality of building an elevator to Hell.

  What did heaven have? An escalator, maybe?

  The contract was still in h
is hand, and it occurred to Alan that he'd never even read the thing himself. What had the receptionist seen in it that had caused her to scream like the damned of Hell?

  He opened up the contract.

  If Alan had any doubts that his neighbor Lou was actually ruler of Hell, they vanished at that moment. When he had first been given the contract, it was scarcely larger than a typical sheet of folded notebook paper, yet when he opened it, it unfurled to the width of a tapestry and unrolled all the way down to his feet like an ancient scroll, complete with fiery, crimson tassels.

  Additionally, the words inscribed on the parchment were made entirely of fire. Alan read them aloud.

  “I, Lucifer, Lord of the Nine Circles, the First Fallen, the Last Saved, the Abaddon, the Leviathan, the Antichrist, the Lawless One, the Serpent of Old--

  --Do Solemnly Decree That I Shall Return My Neighbor Alan's Lawnmower Upon Completion of the Mowing of My Yard.” Alan read it over and over again. When he saw Lou scribble the contract out, it hadn't taken more than half a second. How he had produced such an enchanting legal document was beyond Alan's comprehension.

  He nodded, folded up the contract, and put it back in his pocket. Once again, the document assumed the form of a regular sheet of folded notebook paper. He put it back in his pants pocket just as the elevator finally came to a rest and opened its doors into the yawning depths of suffering and misery that was the final resting place for the Souls of the Damned.

  It was pleasantly warm, actually.

  Alan, confused, stepped forward. The elevator closed and ascended behind him. He turned around and stared back at it. “Hey!” he shouted as it disappeared into the blackness above. “Come back here!” He accidentally bumped into something. It was a stalagmite. It had an elevator call button on it. “Oh,” he said.

  Hell, it seemed, was not how most people let on. It looked like a reddish, well-lit cave. There were rocks and stalagmites everywhere. And not much else.

  He was expecting lakes of fire from which legions of tortured hands protruded, their owners forever burning, screeching, reaching for the heaven they had been denied. But there were no screams, nor was there anybody to make them.

  “Hello?” called Alan. Nobody answered. He walked forward. “Hello?” he called as he walked. “Is anybody there?”

  For ten minutes he walked, until he finally met someone.

  It was a janitor.

  He was dressed in a blue jump suit and had a white mustache that could sweep the cave floor as efficiently as the broom he was holding. “Um, excuse me,” said Alan. “Do you know where everyone's gone?”

  The janitor stopped his sweeping and stared at Alan alarmingly. “What're you still doin' here?” he asked. “Everyone's gone. Yer late.”

  “Where've they gone?” asked Alan.

  “Don't act like you don't know,” said the janitor, and resumed sweeping.

  “Look,” said Alan, withdrawing the contract from his pocket. “I'm Alan. I've got a signed document here from your boss.”

  “Boss ain't here,” said the janitor. “I'm just sweepin' up after everyone so when they come back it'll be nice an' clean.”

  “But where have they gone?”

  “You work here,” said the janitor. “You must've gotten the memos.”

  “No, I don't work here,” said Alan.

  The janitor paused his sweeping again. He stood up and looked Alan up and down. “No,” he said. “You don't work here.”

  Alan once again offered the signed document, and this time the janitor took it. He unfurled it, and read the fiery letters. A faint smile could be seen under his enormous mustache. “Lord,” he said. “You must really want yer lawnmower.”

  “Not really,” said Alan. “I'm more worried about my neighbor. He disappeared one day. He never told me he was the Devil.” There was a note of disappointment in Alan’s voice as he said this.

  The janitor folded up the document and handed it back to Alan. “Yer a good man,” he said. “Nobody ever worries about the Devil. Who says he don't need lookin' after from time to time?”

  “Well, where's he gone?” asked Alan.

  “Same as everyone else here,” said the janitor. “Off to purgatory to fight the Apocalypse.”

  “The Apocalypse?” asked Alan. “You mean that group of religious nuts camping outside my neighborhood was right?”

  “There's always someone proclaimin' the Apocalypse,” said the janitor. “One of em's gonna be right eventually. Can't beat them odds.”

  “Well, then, if they're fighting the Apocalypse, what are you doing here?” Alan asked. “If it's the final battle, they aren't coming back, are they?”

  “Oh, they never actually get around to it, y'know,” said the janitor as he swept. “Somethin' always comes up, and they get interrupted. Then, they come back and wait till the next End of Days.”

  “Something always happens?” asked Alan. “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, if I'm readin' that there document correctly,” said the Janitor, gesturing with his broom handle towards the folded contract in Alan's hand, “Looks like this time, that somethin' is you.”

  Alan thought about this for a good long while. He nodded, and put the contract back in his pocket, knowing what he had to do. “Well, then,” he said, “Can you tell me how I get to Purgatory?”

  “If I didn't,” said the janitor, “I'd be out of the job.”