Angel Heart, A Ghost Story

The old man carrying the broom hurried down the path, struggling for breath.

“Hurry,” he gasped out to the younger man and woman who were a few feet behind, 'We have to get to her tomb before the moon rises! HURRY!!”

The younger man stopped and whispered to his wife. “This is so creepy. I'm not superstitious, but a graveyard on Hallowe'en night, with a full moon? Why does he have to do it this year?”

The young woman just looked at him for a few seconds. “Hurry!” was all she said in response, and walked away, following her father.

When they caught up with the old man, he was on his knees before a granite mausoleum, the broom laying beside him, fumbling with a large, old and rusty padlock, and a key that would not insert its full length. “Help him, Ben” the young woman hissed.

Ben looked at the old man, and his wife, then at the full moon just beginning to show over the hedge that surrounded the cemetery, and finally shrugged and knelt down beside the older man. “Here, Karl, let me help.” He pulled the key from the rusted lock, then jammed it hard, back in to its full depth. The tumblers still resisted, but finally and suddenly, as the first silvered moonlight touched the top of the mausoleum, the lock opened.

In the moonlight, the epitaph carved into the granite lintel stood out with sharp shadows:

'Angela Hart
Most Beloved Wife, Friend, Teacher, Mother
Taken Too Soon And Deeply Missed
Born October 31, 1942
Died October 31, 1990'

Ben stood and reached down to Karl, who looked up, gave a small, embarrassed smile, then grasped the younger mans arm to pull himself upright.

“Thank you,” he said, quietly, then turned and pulled open the ornate door of the crypt, disturbing dust and the discarded webs of generations of spiders. Karl stared, motionless, while the rising moon slowly illuminated the interior of his only loves final resting place.

“Oh, my love, I am so sorry I have let your place get into such a state.” He bent down and picked up the broom, and turned to face his family. “Please,” he said “go on now. Get a coffee or some dinner. Come back for me in a few hours.”

“Dad! We can't just leave you here!”

“Why not, child? Surely you don't think anything will hurt me in your mothers house?”

“It's not that. It's your health. I can hear your breathing from here! What if something happens?”

“I'll be fine. Please, just go and leave me to my folly. You can see the path very well, now, by the light of the moon.” He turned, and holding the broom before him like a sword, started into the crypt.

“Dad, come out!” she cried, but as he crossed the threshold of the mausoleum he no longer heard her. All sounds from the outside were muted. No traffic, no birds, no wind. All he heard was the rasping of his own lungs, and the swishing of the broom as he cleared a path to Angelas coffin.

Outside, Karla started toward the crypt door, but Ben caught her in his arms. She looked up at him with true fear in her eyes, but he gently kissed her cheek, and quietly said, “he needs his privacy, now. As silly as I think this is, we have to respect his wishes.  Don't worry, we won't go far, just to the car, and come back in an hour or so, OK?”

Karla nodded, and they turned and began the walk back to the parking area. “you know,” he said, “this place actually is pretty in the moonlight.”

“Well, except for the ghosts,” he added, with a chuckle. They walked on.

Inside the crypt, Karl swept and brushed until he was nearly exhausted, pushing the detritus out the mausoleum door until the inside of his wifes place was as clean as he could make it. Reaching into his overcoat pockets, he brought out a small handful of candles, the short, squat plumbers type, that would burn for hours, and a pack of matches.

He lit his first candle and placed it on the top of Angelas coffin. Then placed the others into sconces around the periphery of the tiny room. Shadows danced slowly in the soft breeze that came through the crypt door, and Karl went to sit on the bench beside his wife.

He bent his stiffened back and lay his forehead against the cold stone of the vault. For a moment, the only sound was his breathing, slowly returning to normal. But after a few minutes he began to speak, softly, to his dead wife.

“Twenty years ago, today, Love. Twenty years ago that you left me behind. I have missed you every hour of every day of every one of those years.” A single tear slipped down his cheek.

“I know that you cannot come back to me, even on this magical day that is the anniversary of your birth, and of our wedding, and of the birth of our daughter, and of course, the twentieth anniversary of your death.” He choked on the last words.

“I know you cannot come back to me, but please, tell me that it is time for me to come to you.”

Angela is silent.

Karl laid his head back onto the vault, closed his eyes and began to remember.


October 31st, Hallowe'en night, 1961:

Karl Hart stands on the sidewalk outside the fraternity house Hallowe'en party. He makes a wry face at the hand-lettered sign 'We Tappa Kegga' sitting on the front porch between two poorly carved and overlit jack-o-lanterns.

For the third or fourth time he wonders why he is here. A twenty-five year old grad student and teaching assistant really should not be found in a house full of drunk, and possibly stoned, underclassmen.

For the second time, he wills his feet to turn around and head back to his quiet and empty studio apartment, but they rebel, and propel him forward, up the stairs and into the hail of noise inside.

“Hey, TEACH,” yells a young man he vaguely recognizes, “have a beer!”

Karl walks slowly through the house, avoiding gyrating dancers and stumbling drunks, clutching the over-sized plastic cup the young man thrust into his hands. He is shaking his head, continuously, wondering at his own foolishness for being here, as well as the foolishness of those around him.

He enters a relatively quiet room, and suddenly sees the reason he is here.

A tall, lean young woman is sitting, alone, on a crowded sofa.

“Too young for me,” thinks Karl. But then she looks at him, and smiles a small smile, and Karl can see that she is young, and old, and ageless.

Her long dark hair is unstyled, her lips unsticked her eyes unshadowed and her cheeks unblushed. Her huge dark eyes seem to see inside him immediately. She smiles again, a little larger this time, and pats the sliver of cushion beside her.

Karl tentatively moves forward, unsure how he will fit his already-slightly-too-ample behind into that tiny space, when the other occupants of the sofa suddenly en masse rise and head for the far noisier dancing room.

“Hello,” she says in a rich contralto voice. “My name is Angela.”

“M-my name is Karl,” he stammers.”

“Of course it is,” she answers. As she speaks, her eyes seem to slowly shift colors, from the dark brown of his first impression, through hazel, then to green.

She takes a small sip of the Coke she is holding, and Karl looks around for a place to put his unimportant and unwanted beer glass.

“So,” he says, after finding a place to ditch the beer, “aren't you a little young to be here?” {Idiot, idiot! Idiot!} screams his inner voice.

“I'm really old enough to be anywhere,” she says, with a repeat of the first small smile. “Like outside, for instance?” She rises and heads for the back door, and Karl follows without even a seconds hesitation.

When they are outside, in the light of the full moon, Angela smiles again, full and bright, this time. “I am glad you came tonight. I thought this was going to be another empty birthday.”

“It's your birthday? Hallowe'en? Well, happy birthday!”

“Thank you.” They sit on a stone bench in the back yard, bathed in argent moonlight. The raucous party sounds fade to silence as she talks, telling him of her birth, six weeks early, on Hallowe'en, and how it had almost killed her mother. “They named me Angela to make up for that,” she says quietly.

She tells him she is an advanced student, already a junior at nineteen, in the philosophy department.

“Oh, tail-chasing” he says, trying to be funny.

“I thought that's what you were doing,” she responds, then laughs with a raspy chuckle.

Karls face reddens, and to cover, he tells her he is a grad student in organic chemistry, “a hard science” he starts to say, then stops mid-sentence at the raise of her eyebrows.

“Will you walk me home?” she asks.

“Of course.” By then, Karl knew, he would have walked through fire to be near her for another minute.

The walk is slow and quiet, but not with any feeling of discomfort in the silence. It is as though they have known each other all their lives, and all of that past was simply prelude to all of their future.

At her door, on a quiet street in a quiet part of town, she says, “Thank you, I will see you again tomorrow.” then she kisses his forehead, turns and disappears into the house. The place her lips touched burns with a pleasant fire.

Karl turns and begins to walk back toward his own lodging, and the sounds of the night reappear. “Trick Or treat'” shouts a childrens chorus. And the music of fraternity and sorority parties breaks through, interspersed with 'A Night On Bald Mountain' echoing from a more adult fete.



In the crypt, Karl raises his head. “Please, My Sweet,” he whispers, “tell me it is my time, now.”

Angela is silent.



October 31st, Hallowe'en morning, 1963:

It was a joyful wedding.

After all the pomp, all the tears of happiness, all the tradition, Mr and Mrs Karl and Angela Hart sped away in the rented limousine.

Karl looked into her violet eyes. “Now you are, truly, my Angel Heart,” said Karl. Angela smiled.



In the mausoleum, Karl feels a stirring beneath his forehead. He sits upright, and tries to see through the wavering candle light.

But Angela is still silent.



October 31st, Hallowe'en, 1968:

It had been a difficult pregnancy and a hard labor.

More than once, Karl had slipped away and prayed, begging for the lives of his wife and child.

Finally, just a few minutes before midnight, the obstetrician announced that he was going to do a C-Section. “She can't take much more of this,” he said.

After they had prepared Angela for the surgery, Karl slipped back to the chapel, expecting the worst and praying for the best.

The head ob/gyn nurse found him there.

“Mr Hart, it's done.”

“Done?” he moaned.

“No, no,” she said, immediately sorry for her poor choice of words. “They are both fine. You have a wife and a new daughter!”



This time, Karl is sure he feels the stone slab covering Angelas coffin moving.

“Please,” he gasps, “Oh, please God, please Angela!” But when he opens his eyes, the stone is still in place, as solid as Gibraltar.

And Angela is still silent.



October 31st, Hallowe'en evening, 1990:

Karl came home early, wearing a grin. The final results were in on his experiments of more than twenty years. He knew, finally, how to prevent more diseases than any vaccine, any regimen, had ever hoped to cure.

He danced into the small house. “Angel!” he sang, “Angela, come kiss your genius husband.”

The house was silent. “She must be out shopping,” said his internal voice. But she was not.

“It was a cerebral hemorrhage,” said Paulus Stein, MD, PhD and life-long friend. “She did not feel a thing,” he added, hoping that Karl would not see through the white lie.

But Karl was too sunken into despair to notice the lie, or the kindness that lay beneath.

After that, all was a dark blur. The terrible call to Karla and her new husband, the arrangements for the burial of his Angel Heart, and his heart, the sad murmurings of friends and acquaintances. Until finally, the far too loud sound of the closing of the gate on his wifes final resting place.


In the crypt, Karl sat straight up again. The stone top of his Sweet Wifes sarcophagus was moving, opening. He leaned forward.

“Please, my Love, my life,” he repeated. “Tell me that this is my time to come with you.”



Outside the crypt, Ben and Karla came walking quietly through the moonlight.

“Let me go in first,” said Karla.

“OK, if you're sure.”

Karla stepped through the door and screamed, "Daddy!"

Ben pushed in behind her to see Karl lying still, between the bench and the coffin in the fading light of the shrinking candles.

Ben knelt beside his father-in-law and felt for a pulse. “He's alive!” he yelled to his weeping bride.  "Just passed out."

He put his hands under Karls arms and lifted him to the bench. Slowly, Karls breathing became stronger, but he still sat, slumped and sobbing, as both Ben and Karla held his hands.

Finally, after a few minutes, Karl was able to control his crying.

He looked to his daughter, then his son-in-law, then at last to the carved stone crypt that held the body of his only love.

Angela had finally spoken to him.

She had said, “no.”