"Time And Eternity"

Jessica Maryanne Descriox (Ne-Doncaster) and Walter K. Descriox Jr. had no idea what they were getting themselves into when they added the words "for time and eternity" to the marriage vows they collaboratively wrote for their safari vacation wedding in 1966. Fifty years later, (still married, not always happily but forever faithfully,) the now 71 and 74 year old couple died together in their sleep when a faulty oxygen sensor on their furnace filled the basement flat they lived in with carbon monoxide.
(They'd managed a Liverpool apartment building for the past nine years since Walter retired from his post at the Office of Public Works for the North-Western England Administrative District.)

The was a tragedy, of course, but barely made the paper outside the obituaries, and that only because Mrs. Descroix had gotten in a screaming row with the former tenants of flat F when she caught them trying to break back in after they were evicted from the building for selling narcotics two days earlier. Further digging by the constables proved that the faulty sensor was one that should have been part of a general recall, replaced only two weeks earlier, a week before the recall went out, and the HVAC Company had sent someone by to talk to them about replacement promptly at noon every day since, as well as calling every night at six, but gotten no response.

The judge ruled no one was at fault, the HVAC Company could not have known it was the Descroix' habit to take a two hour walk down to the harbor and back from 11:30 to 1:30 each day, rain or shine, nor that every night from five sharp untill seven sharp they called one of their six children who were scattered across the U.K. and got their weekly update on that branch of the family including all the details on their thirty-eight grandchildren and great-grandchildren.(Except Sundays when they spent the entire day at church with their youngest daughter Elizabeth, her husband Pastor Thomas, and their five teenage kids.)

That of course was just the start of things.

You see, Jessica and Walter Descriox had made a critical error in inserting that particular phrase into their vows fifty years ago, because the celestial bureaucracy's automated systems for sorting marriage vows file all covenants made with that phrase into the 'Mormon' category: and they NEVER wore their 'Garments'.

In point of fact the Descriox's were not especially religious people until very late in life, and even then both of them hadn't been especially good Christians.

After a long wait in the halls of judgement bellow the pearly gates it was ultimately decided that they were not worthy enough for Heaven, not damned enough for Hell, not complacent enough for Limbo, and not devout enough for Purgatory. This left two options: reincarnation, or the slow fading echo of ghosts, in which they MIGHT, if they worked off their karmic debt, earn a place in Heaven.

So, some years later, back to Earth they went, with a pass to haunt their old building, the route to the harbor, and Pastor Thomas church. They could reveal themselves to the general public whenever they liked, but only if they didn't sense any active recording devices. (Which they could, intuitively.)

That brings us up to the present day, as they are just stepping off the chariot of the Moon to ride a Moon-Beam back to Earth...