Read Magic for Beginners: Stories for Free Online

an
apple from the fruit display and polished it on his non-Euclidean
pajama top. The apple took on a horrid, whispery sheen. “Has
Charley come by?”
    “Yeah,” Eric said. He and Charley would go to Las Vegas. They
would buy Batu gold lamé pajamas. “I think you’re right. I think
she’s about to leave town.”
    “Well, she can’t!” Batu said. “That’s not the plan. Here, I tell
you what we’ll do. You go outside and wait for her. Make sure she
doesn’t get away.”
    “She’s not wanted by the police, Batu,” Eric said. “She doesn’t
belong to us. She can leave town if she wants to.”
    “And you’re okay with that?” Batu said. He yawned ferociously,
and yawned again, and stretched, so that the pajama top heaved up
in an eldritch manner. Eric closed his eyes.
    “Not really,” Eric said. He had already picked out a toothbrush,
some toothpaste, and some novelty teeth, left over from Halloween,
which he could give to Charley, maybe. “Are you okay? Are you going
to fall asleep again? Can I ask you some questions?”
    “What kind of questions?” Batu said, lowering his eyelids in a
way that seemed both sleepy and cunning.
    “Questions about our mission,” Eric said. “About the All-Night
and what we’re doing here next to the Ausible Chasm. I need to
understand what just happened with the zombies and the pajamas, and
whether or not what happened is part of the plan, and whether or
not the plan belongs to us, or whether the plan was planned by
someone else, and we’re just somebody else’s big experiment in
retail. Are we brand-new, or are we just the same old thing?”
    “This isn’t a good time for questions,” Batu said. “In all the
time that we’ve worked here, have I lied to you? Have I led you
astray?”
    “Well,” Eric said. “That’s what I need to know.”
    “Perhaps I haven’t told you everything,” Batu said. “But that’s
part of the plan. When I said that we were going to make everything
new again, that we were going to reinvent retail, I was telling the
truth. The plan is still the plan, and you are still part of that
plan, and so is Charley.”
    “What about the pajamas?” Eric said. “What about the Canadians
and the maple syrup and the people who come in to buy Mountain
Dew?”
    “You need to know this?” Batu said.
    “Yes,” Eric said. “Absolutely.”
    “Okay, then. My pajamas are
experimental CIA pajamas
,”
Batu said. “Like batteries. You’ve been charging them for me when
you sleep. That’s all I can say right now. Forget about the
Canadians. These pajamas the zombies just gave me—do you have any
idea what this means?”
    Eric shook his head no.
    Batu said, “Never mind. Do you know what we need now?”
    “What do we need?” Eric said.
    “We need you to go outside and wait for Charley,” Batu said. “We
don’t have time for this. It’s getting early. Charley gets off work
any time now.”
    “Explain all of that again,” Eric said. “What you just said.
Explain the plan to me one more time.”
    “Look,” Batu said. “Listen. Everybody is alive at first,
right?”
    “Right,” Eric said.
    “And everybody dies,” Batu said. “Right?”
    “Right,” Eric said. A car drove by, but it still wasn’t
Charley.
    “So everybody starts here,” Batu said. “Not here, in the
All-Night, but somewhere
here
, where we are. Where we live
now. Where we live is here. The world. Right?”
    “Right,” Eric said. “Okay.”
    “And where we go is there,” Batu said, flicking a finger towards
the road. “Out there, down into the Ausible Chasm. Everybody goes
there. And here we are,
here
, the All-Night, which is on
the way to
there
.”
    “Right,” Eric said.
    “So it’s like the Canadians,” Batu said. “People are going
someplace, and if they need something, they can stop here, to get
it. But we need to know what they need. This is a whole new
unexplored demographic. So they stuck the All-Night right here, lit
it up like a