Mel asked, “Looks pretty, but what the hell is it?”
“A psychotronic diviner,” Phyllis answered. “It detects psychic energy.”
Psychic energy. The two words boomeranged into my brain. This was another example of how my experiences with the weird and supernatural kept twirling back upon themselves.
What originally brought me to Colorado was an assignment I had contracted with an alien masquerading as a college friend. The alien wanted me to find out what was causing an outbreak of nymphomania at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant. The alien knew all along what the cause was-a bizarre red mercury isotope leaking from a UFO the government was studying at Rocky Flats. What the alien really wanted, and couldn’t get because of government security, was a different psychotronic instrument, what he called simply a device, that was stored in the UFO.
I turned my attention to the diviner. “This doesn’t look like the device I found in the UFO.” That one resembled a box camera with two handgrips. It was a prototype with a more sinister application than merely detecting psychic energy: it was to test psychic control of humans.
After I had retrieved the device from the UFO-at great risk to myself-and learned about its function, I destroyed it. The alien hadn’t liked that, but screw him for lying to me.
I studied the diviner, fascinated by the ostentatious decoration. “So this detects psychic energy. What’s the big deal? I can take off my contacts and see auras.”
Phyllis grew pensive, as if gathering herself to explain something complicated to someone not as smart as she. “Are you familiar with the astral plane?”
“I’ve heard of it. That’s the extent of what I know.”
“In our physical world,” Phyllis said, “we have three dimensions.”
Mel interrupted and said, “Actually four, as you have to include time,” proving he’s more than his Neanderthal appearance.
“Okay, four,” Phyllis relented. “Consider the astral plane as another dimension. One we can access only by using the psychic energy component of our being. You’ve heard of astral projection?”
“I saw an ad about it in a comic book. Right next to one about X-ray specs.”
Phyllis kept her expression arid and inert. “Astral projection is when our psychic selves travel from one place to another across the astral plane. That’s one phenomenon involving the astral plane. Others include remote viewing and out-of-body experiences.”
I asked, “How does this concern the Araneum?”
“The Araneum is investigating the use of the astral plane.”
“For what reasons? Discount travel?”
Phyllis’s voice became a little more dry. “Something like that but we shouldn’t speculate.”
As in, you don’t need to know.
The bartender interrupted when she brought our drinks. She glanced at the diviner and remained unamused, as if she’d seen stranger things in the bar. She poured the beers into glasses and left.
I tasted my beer. “Where did this diviner come from?”
Phyllis took a collection of papers from the carry-on. They were photocopies of pages from a notebook. The writing on the margins used Cyrillic letters. “In your investigation of Rocky Flats, did you ever come across a Dr. Milan Blavatsky?”
“No.”
Phyllis said, “He was a scientist hired to reverse-engineer what the government could of the UFO. These are his private notes.”
Workers at Rocky Flats were forbidden from taking classified material. Sometimes the security precautions were concrete solid; other times, they were a sieve.
I studied the small drawings and the cramped lettering. The notes were reduced images of much larger originals. Some of the drawings were simple representations of the case and the pyramid. There was also one sketch of the original psychotronic device. Other drawings were as complex and indecipherable as the electrical schematics of a rocket ship.
Mel traced a big finger along the most complicated of the drawings. His eyes registered admiration.
I went from the plans to the diviner. “I was under the impression the government couldn’t deduce much from the UFO. Too advanced.”
Phyllis said, “Another lie.”
“Figures. Where did you get these notes?”
“After Blavatsky retired”-Phyllis drank from her glass-“he went public with them but didn’t get much attention outside of obscure pseudoscience journals.”
“Seems the government would’ve tried to stop him.”
“Maybe they did.”
“What do you mean?”
“Dr. Blavatsky was obsessed with UFO phenomenon,” Phyllis replied. “When he went to a wheat field to investigate a crop circle, he got run over by a combine.”
Phyllis waited as if she wanted a chuckle, but to me, the point of her anecdote was that psychic energy studies were not only weird but deadly.
I didn’t laugh.
I opened my right hand. “Here’s my zombie.” I opened my left hand. “Here is the psychotronic diviner.” I put my hands together. “What’s the connection?”
Phyllis reached back into the carry-on and withdrew a state highway map of Colorado. “The Araneum has triangulated the source of an unusual set of psychic signals.” She laid the map flat beside the diviner and noted two thick pencil lines. One started in Boulder. The other came from the southeast, off the map.
“Austin, Texas,” Phyllis explained.
The two lines intersected over Morada.
Zombies. Psychic signals. The astral plane. All had something to do with Morada. Even trying to guess made my thoughts loopy, as if my beer had been spiked.
“What’s so important about this particular signal?”
Phyllis answered, “The signal is unusually strong.”
“What’s the source? Supernatural? Human? Alien?”
“We don’t know. That’s your job to find out.”
Mel massaged his temples. “All this mental gymnastics has made me hungry. Anybody up for a snack?”
He set his lunch box on the table. “I’ve eaten here before. The menu would make a goat puke.” He opened the lunch box and doled out three bags of warm blood. “A-negative.” He offered straws that we punched into the bags. With plastic bendy straws sticking out the tops, the silvery bags looked like kids’ juice containers.
The bartender returned. “No outside food or drink.”
Mel waved his bag. “We’re on a special diet.”
One end of the bartender’s unibrow levered upward. Her forehead wrinkled and the makeup cracked like plaster.
I tossed a ten on the table. “Let’s pretend we ordered something to eat.”
The bartender curled the ten around her long purple fingernails, tucked the money down the front of her blouse between the tattoos of two devils, and walked off.
The blood tasted good but did nothing to improve my understanding of psychic energy or my attitude toward this investigation.
Phyllis pushed the diviner across the table toward me. “You’re going to need this to locate the signal.”
Given the ambiguities in this assignment, the diviner seemed less like a tool and more like Pandora’s box. “So this particular signal comes from Morada. Why is that such a big deal?”
Phyllis hesitated as if parsing in her mind what she could and couldn’t tell me. “Usually the use of psychic energy is a passive activity, similar to hearing or observing. But there are some who can focus and direct their psychic energy outward-a psychic energy attack, if you will.”
I pulled my chair closer. “For what reason?”
“To enter someone’s psyche through their subconscious. Imagine if you could reach someone through their dreams.”
Dreams. Were my nightmares and hallucinations the result of psychic manipulation?
I had thought of the Iraqi girl’s resurrection as a symptom of my guilt. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe someone had opened up my head and was monkeying around in my subconscious.