Hennison grunted in displeasure. “You’re playing games. Give me straight answers. You know what this is for?”

“I do.”

“And?” Hennison circled his fingers.

Now he was playing games. This was his power trip. I wasn’t going to tell him anything he didn’t know.

Hennison pulled a wide plastic tube from the shelf where the diviners had rested. He uncapped one end of the tube and shook out large sheets of paper that he unfurled.

He laid the sheets on the table beside me and put heavy bolts on the opposite edges to keep them from curling together.

Hennison grasped my head and tilted it to look at the sheets. They were either copies or the originals of Dr. Blavatsky’s notes from the Rocky Flats UFO.

“You’ve seen these, yes?”

“I have, but all I know is they were used to build those things over there.”

“Things?” Hennison straightened as if insulted. “These things are like discovering fire. You know what they’re for?”

“Detecting psychic energy?”

“You don’t sound impressed.”

“I’m not. Look at all the trouble they’ve gotten me into.”

“Why are you in Morada, Mr. Vampire?”

“To find the source of the psychic energy.” And zombies.

“Which is why I’m here as well. This device is a keyhole into the astral plane. The trouble is, I can see into the astral plane, but I can’t get into it.”

He pressed his hand against my forehead and pushed my head to the table. He brought his nose close to mine. I could read every pore and wrinkle in his face.

“If you’re here looking for the source, then you vampires also want to enter the astral plane. So it’s a race.”

Hennison brought his mouth close to my left ear. His breath puffed warmly against my skin. “And guess what? You lost.” He straightened up. “Which means I’ve won.” He laughed. He motioned for the zombies to join him.

The room filled with his mad scientist cackle and the ghaw, ghaw of the zombies.

Hennison wiped a tear from one eye. “We barely know each other and I am going to miss you, Felix. It’s been months since I’ve had a discussion as stimulating.”

“You that lonely out here?”

“I have plenty of contact. I subscribe to e-newsletters and Yahoo Groups. I blog. There’s no dearth of communication.”

“I meant real conversation.”

“Yeah, that’s a challenge. Reginald”-Hennison cocked a thumb to Lab Coat-“can about pass for a live human but his brain was too far gone. My fault. See, I conked him a little too hard on the noggin. Reginald, turn around.”

Reginald put his back to us. Hennison lifted Reginald’s scalp and showed a baseball-sized dent in the skull.

Hennison smoothed the scalp into place. “I didn’t mean to kill him. By the time I got him on the table and started the process, too late.” He grasped Reginald’s chin and gave it an affectionate shake. “Poor guy.”

Reginald’s eyes had the dull shine of the look from a loyal yet very dead dog.

“I preserved Barrett Chambers’s brain enough for him to drive, but you may have noticed that I neglected to keep his body looking April fresh.”

“Nothing a little Right Guard couldn’t help,” I said. “What about talking zombies?”

“Only one. And one too many for now, unfortunately.” Hennison yelled toward a stairwell leading to the lower floor. “Sonia.”

The zombies in the room fidgeted. What would make them uncomfortable?

Hennison cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled again. “Sonia.”

Quick footfalls approached up the stairs, clicking and slapping, the sound of high heels moving in a woman’s cadence.

Hennison tapped the workbench impatiently.

A platinum blonde rose onto the landing, hair in a Mary Tyler Moore cut and with puffy pink skin the color of cooked salmon. She wore a white nightgown with a fluffy hem and sleeves and strutted on clear stiletto mule pumps. Her lean bare legs looked impossibly long, like they’d been extruded from a die. Red stitch marks circled her neck, biceps, and the middle of her thighs.

Sonia’s gray eyes were shiny as glass and just as inert but the set of her brow and the drag of her lower face expressed seething contempt. “Vhat you vant?”

“Sonia’s my mail-order Russian bride.” Hennison motioned toward me. “Say hello to our guest.”

Her nose wrinkled as if I was the one who reeked of Dumpster cadaver. “Hello, guest.”

“Show a little class, will you?” He grasped her wrist and yanked. Sonia stumbled on her heels. Her breasts remained fixed inside the nightgown like a pair of plastic globes.

Hennison laid her hand on my chest. “Feel this.” She was cool but not corpse cold.

“I wrap her in an electric blanket, set it on high, and you couldn’t tell the difference between her and any horny nurse.”

Sonia twisted her hand free. She pulled over a battered wooden chair and sat. “Yes, I have dick privileges, aren’t I the lucky one.”

Hennison said, “She’s pissed because I killed her.”

Sonia reached into the top of her nightgown and pulled out a cigarette. She sorted through tools on the workbench, found a butane torch, and lit it. The nozzle shot a yellow tongue of fire. Her thumb worked the regulator knob and the torch flame shrank to a blue point.

Hennison reached to take her cigarette. “Goddamn it, haven’t I told you about the dangers?”

She turned and gave him the shoulder. “Vhat, that it’s bad for my health? I’m a zombie, you moron.”

“I meant a fire hazard.”

Sonia lit the cigarette and took a long defiant puff. “Yes, of course. Heaven forbid that anything happens to this palace.” She set her shoe against a metal box and tipped it over. Nuts and bolts, plastic vials, and human hands in Ziploc bags dumped to the floor.

“Don’t push me, Sonia. Remember the last time?” Hennison pointed to her neck. “I took off her head and mounted it backward.”

Smoke curled from the stitches along Sonia’s throat, from inside the cleavage of her nightgown, and from her hair. She crossed her legs and let an expression of boredom sink across her zombie face. “And you turned it back around after you discovered that my blow jobs weren’t worth a shit. Big genius you are.”

“Women, even undead they’re a ball and chain.” Hennison shared a brotherly look that we were comrades in the war between the sexes, ignoring that I was bolted to a table and that he had spent a good part of the morning sizzling my vampire ass with high-voltage electricity.

I said, “Necrophilia is a hard sell.”

Hennison replied, “Bah. Necrophilia is an outmoded term from an outmoded time. This is the twenty-first century.”

“But, Doc,” I said, “the stitches. The scars. You have to consider the aesthetics.”

“You’re right, of course,” Hennison said. “What Sonia demonstrates, in her own gracious Slavic way, is that it is possible to create a nearly human zombie. I learned much during her process; the next time the zombie will be flawless. The caveat is that the victim, I mean subject, should be a little younger. Sonia didn’t know what I was doing, she thought it was an advanced makeover process…which it was.” Hennison laughed at his joke.

Sonia ground the cigarette in the palm of her hand. She flicked the dead butt against cowboy zombie.

“Why do they follow your orders?” I asked.

“Because I’m their creator. I take care of them, give them shelter; where else would they go?” Hennison kept quiet for a moment. “Let’s try an experiment.” He shouted at the zombies. “You’re all free to go. Free. Free at last.”

Sonia got to her feet.

Hennison grabbed her shoulder and pushed her back into the chair. “Not you.”

The other zombies stared at him, to the outside door, then back to him. They picked at their scabs and gave tiny grimaces of confusion.

“I thought so,” Hennison said. “I made them. They owe me complete allegiance.”

“You’re creating an army of zombies.”

“More than that. I’ve tapped into something more profound.” Hennison paused, his face flush with imagined glory, as if to cue the trumpets and drums. Maybe in his head.