The Beast Fears Fire - The Evil Dead

People in Crickton have access to enough evidence and information about the afterlife that they can be fairly certain what it's all about.  For most people, there really isn't one.  You can summon up a spirit with all the memories and psyche of what its living person once had and they will tell you right out what they've experienced since leaving their body: not a whole hell of a lot.  There's some initial disorientation, but then the spirit slides into shadow, into its own mind and experiences, and relives them, in no particular order.  This accounts for a very small amount of time, though, most of the time, they aren't; they're asleep, or gone, or something.  Over time, the spirits tend to degrade, dreaming less and sleeping more, harder and harder to distinguish from the world.  Some of it comes back in new bodies, new lives, and it may be, in large part of and from a person before, but not all of it, not even most of it.  The strongest cases of spiritual preservation comprise maybe a third of a new spirit in a new life.  They have ways of figuring this out.

Point is that when you die, you are not coming back.  Bits of you will come back, but you aren't you anymore, and the potentially thousands of people who will be born with pieces of you aren't you.  There is no you.

For some of you, this is going to be a difficult thing to swallow.  You aren't alone.  Folks have been messing with spiritual preservation since they knew that useful postmortem survival wasn't an option.  There are methods, some are quite elaborate, some very difficult; some aren't even particularly evil and don't result in becoming a horror, but none of those have really taken.  The ones that have, the ones you're likely to see, are ones that a person can do accidentally, or have done to them against their will, the ones that make monsters.

Because we are here for the monsters.

There is a notion that someone can be bad enough, or so focused on postmortem survival that the shadows won't take them, that once they have the design on coming back, or more accurately, on sticking around, that they taint themselves, and can't go back.  It's a comforting thought, since what sticks around is dangerous, unpleasant, and well, I did use the word "evil" in the title and the coffin fits the corpse, so to speak.  And they usually bring a handful of people over to their side of the dividing line, so it's nice to believe that your loved ones won't be bunking with them.  Sadly and happily, depending on how you look at it, this is not the case.  A spirit gone all wrong like that is sort of like a person who has decided not to sleep ever again and manages it.  Stay awake for long enough, and you will lose your mind.  Cricks learned that in the war and the Dahanish prison camps.  The human body will die if kept awake for long enough, but a spirit can't, so the degradation of the psyche just goes on and on.  I suspect this plays a role in their behavior towards the living, and also presents the best hope for dislodging them from the living world.

You have to knock them out.