Page 58 of Installment Immortality

“Of course,” echoed Sam, sounding almost stunned.

“If youreallywant to torture them, you shake the jar once you have the ghost secured. Force all that nasty stuff through their body, disrupt and unsettle them.”

Sam frowned. “I’d be pretty unsettled if you kept pelting me with anti-Furi junk.”

“What would you consider ‘anti-Furi’?” I asked, unable to help myself.

“I dunno. Bananas and human shoes?”

“You are a very understandable man, Samuel Taylor,” I said. “But no, that’s not what ‘unsettled’ means when you’re talking about a ghost. Most of the ghosts you find haunting human houses were human before they died.”

“Makes sense.”

“For human ghosts, they die, and they appear in the twilight as essentially the same sort of haunting—sort of the larval form of whatever kind of spirit they’re going to become. That’s what we call the ‘settling’ phase. During settling, all ghosts are functionally the same. They won’t develop the talents or physical distinctions of their type of spirit until a few days have passed. That’s when ghosts are at their most vulnerable.”

“To what?”

“All sorts of things.” I looked at him grimly, noting that Annie was also paying close attention. For most of her life, I’d been bound by the crossroads, unable to answer even simple questions, much less explain complicated systems like settling. “If something interferes with an unsettled ghost, they can influence what that ghost will eventually settle as. That’s part of how we get haints.”

“What are—?” began Sam.

“A haint is a faded spirit. They don’t really remember who they were when they were alive. Memory is one of the first things an unsettled ghost starts to lose. They forget everything they cared about in life, they forget themselves, and they become, essentially, half-aware cobwebs fluttering through the twilight. But they can hunt and hurt the living if they’re summoned into the daylight world, and they can still manifest under the right conditions. They’re weak, but they move in packs, and it’s hard to fight aghost that has nothing left to care about. Nothing to care about means nothing to lose.”

“Oh,” said Sam, sounding horrified.

“Haunts are a kind of ghost in their own right. I tend to use ‘haunt’ interchangeably with ‘spirit,’ and I really shouldn’t. The vocabulary is just solimitedwhen you’re talking about the dead.”

“This isn’tJust a Minute,” said Antimony. “You’re not being graded on hesitation, deviation, or repetition. Keep going.”

“Right. So ghosts settle, and if they’re stopped from settling, they can develop into haints, which is bad. No one wants an infestation of haints.”

“And the Covenant isunsettling ghosts,” said Annie, slowly. “Mary, this is not good.”

“No, it’s not,” I agreed. “Better: if a ghost is going to develop poltergeist abilities, it happens during settling. I saw some of the captive ghosts back in Massachusetts. I’d say about a third of them have started to become poltergeists.”

Annie winced. “That’s way too many to be normal.”

“Yeah,” I said grimly. “The Covenant is hunting down ordinary ghosts, catching them, and torturing them until they turn into poltergeists, which makes them ten times more dangerous than they would have been otherwise.”

“And you’re here instead of protecting Elsie and Artie because…?”

“Because you’re the only one of us who’s seen this current generation of Covenant operatives. What do you know about Nathaniel and Chloe Cunningham?”

“They’re loyal, and they’re ambitious,” she said. “They know they won’t inherit, or they did when I was there—that was before Leonard lost me, twice. There’s a chance Reginald is reconsidering who holds the position of ‘favorite grandson.’”

“So Nathaniel may be hungry to move up; got it,” I said. “Isn’t it a little sexist to dismiss Chloe like that?”

“Yeah, but it’s also accurate to how Reggie’s going to look at things,” she said. “He’d never hand the Covenant off to a girl, even if he liked her best of all. It’s just not an option.”

“Asshole,” said Sam reflexively.

Annie leaned over until she was resting halfway against his hip, snuggling up within the limits of propriety while I was in the room. “Yup,” she said. “He really is. Were they alone?”

“Half of a four-person team. One guy, American, was in the van outside, and seemed content to stay there. He said he was doing a lot of the research.”

“New recruit, then,” said Annie with confidence. “They’ll have picked him up to provide a local view on things. Can’t hunt ghosts if you don’t know where to look.”

“That matches with what I was assuming,” I said. “He’s about your age, a little socially awkward, a little too willing to be flirted with by a sixteen-year-old girl who says she’s there to toilet-paper his van.”

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