Chapter 11
GAME ABOVE MY HEAD
Micah - Present Day
Something clattered within the studio.
Micah stood outside the open door at the dented balcony railing, a chilly morning wind licking at his ears.
Goosebumps erupted on his skin; he hadn’t grabbed a sweatshirt, but it was too late to go back in.
Having ghostly maintenance men pull up ghostly wood planking wasn’t panic-inducing, but it was damn annoying.
The disturbances weren’t going away – if anything, they’d gotten more prominent.
Cosmo’s time travel idea seemed to be the right one, or at least close enough, which meant Micah couldn’t stay here any longer.
Unearthing dusty memories of his conversations with Ximena when he’d been apartment hunting gave him a rough estimate of where the timeline was at.
By his calculations, his past self would be moving into the studio in two weeks.
He didn’t plan to cause himself more trauma than he’d already been through.
His phone vibrated. He scrubbed at his arms, then expanded the email notification.
Thank you for submitting your portfolio to Identical Dog. While your work is intriguing, it isn’t right for our gallery, so we’ll be stepping aside at this time.
He’d expected that, but he’d had to try. There were still four other galleries he was waiting on responses from. Wait. Another unread email sat in his box.
Thank you for letting Half-Empty Gallery review your portfolio! We’re going to pass! Good luck!!!
“Christ.” With a name like that, you’d think they’d be falling over themselves for his art.
No matter how beautiful Cosmo found Micah’s portraits, they weren’t going to help him come up with enough for a deposit on a new place unless he could get into a gallery and start selling his work.
.. or get an hourly job. The odds for either weren’t looking good.
Leaving the house had been an incredible struggle, and freelancing didn’t work well when he couldn’t bear to have a live model pose for him.
For some reason, people who wanted him to draw a portrait from a photograph expected to pay him an insultingly small amount of money.
He’d be stuck with more tedious landscapes that he couldn’t concentrate on with construction noises in the background.
Wood cracked and splintered from inside, and a faint voice drifted. Micah peeked through the door, met with a crowbar sitting in the middle of the room.
He shivered and stamped his feet. This was ridiculous. He was going to have to call Everett and ask for money.
Unless…
Clutching his elbows, he hurried down the stairs and stopped at Ximena’s office.
He was about to knock when he remembered her concern for his mental well-being whenever he mentioned Cosmo or the strange things happening in the studio.
She’d already been worried about him getting depressed and morbid as a lonely shut-in, but now he was going to seem downright delusional unless he could show her what was happening in person.
And even though the phantom construction noises had been going on all morning, it would be just his luck for them to stop as soon as she entered the apartment.
Before he could leave, the door swung open, and Ximena exclaimed, “Oh! Micah! I was just coming to talk to you. I know your social life isn’t my business, but I–”
Her words dissolved into white noise as he scrambled to tell her why he was there. He gave up and said, “Will you come up to my studio right now? I need to show you something.”
“Is it an emergency?”
“Kind of.”
She shrugged on a sweater and followed him to the steps. “Did a pipe burst? Oh! I didn’t grab my phone. I’ll have to call maintenance.”
He lightly took her elbow and urged her on. “Remember my mirror shattering? And when I told you I found a shower curtain ring even though I don’t have a shower curtain?”
“Yes.”
“And Cosmo–”
“I didn’t give him a lot of thought over the past years, but I did feel bad for him, and it seems like a nasty trick to make people think you’re dead. He never even told me he was moving out. All that being said…” She paused as they stopped before Micah’s apartment. “What’s that noise?”
Wood clattered, and someone laughed. Well, here went nothing. Micah opened the door and said, “Maintenance is already here. They’re ripping out the wood flooring.”
Ximena frowned. “You don’t have wood flooring.”
“Not anymore.” He peered inside. The crowbar still sat on the carpet. “After Cosmo moved out, do you remember breaking a bunch of lightbulbs all over the hall?”
She stared, and her frown grew deeper. “No. What is this about?”
The hairs rose on the back of Micah’s neck, and it didn’t have anything to do with the cold. “I don’t know how else to say this, but the timeline from three years ago is intruding into this studio. The past is bleeding into the present.”
Breath whistled through Ximena’s nose. Her eyes were wide, and she looked like she might bolt down the stairs. “I don’t understand what that means.”
She took a step inside, her knuckles white as she clutched the doorframe. The high-pitched whine of a drill came from the hall and she gasped. Someone said, “Do you know how much it costs to rent a pony for a birthday party?”
Ximena backpedaled so quickly that she ran into Micah. She crossed herself and gripped his arm. “That’s Rick. But he’s dead! He died of a heart attack. I went to his viewing.” Her face grew ashen. “His granddaughter loved ponies. He showed me the pictures from that party.”
Well, at least she hadn’t screamed and run away this time. “You’re hearing past-Rick. Rick from three years ago, when he was pulling up flooring before I moved in.”
Ximena clutched her throat. “The music playing in your place at night…”
“It was Cosmo.”
“How is this happening?”
“I don’t know. I know there isn’t a clause for intruding timelines written into my lease, but I’d really love to move to a different unit before I end up coming face-to-face with myself.”
“You have to!” She reached over and slammed the door, as if that would stop the timewarp inside from spilling out onto the balcony. “Otherwise the man who beat you will show up again. Won’t he?”
Oh god. Micah clenched his teeth. How he wished he would.
How he wished he could come up on his attacker straddling past-Micah on the carpet, rip the blood-coated replica sculpture of Cattelan’s Comedian from his grip, and smash the man’s face in with it.
This time, Micah would shatter his eye socket.
He’d scar his face. Paralyze his iris. And there’d be no going to the hospital for him.
He would bleed out on the floor while the neighbors called the cops.
Micah would cradle his past self in his arms while they waited for the ambulance, and Micah would tell him that it was okay to not be okay.
That’s what he wanted to do anyway, but that’s what he’d wanted to do while it was happening. And he’d failed. He couldn’t risk freezing up and letting himself down again.
“Micah?”
He blinked and looked at Ximena. The expression of pity on her face wasn’t quite as grating today, because he needed it if he was going to get out of here. “What?”
“I said, twenty-six is empty and ready to be moved into. It’s a one bedroom, not a studio, but I won’t charge you any extra. I have some cardboard boxes and milk crates you can pack your smaller things into, and I’ll get some people up to move your furniture and plants, okay?”
“Thank you.” He sighed, and knots in his shoulders unraveled. “You know what this means, though. Any new tenant who moves into twenty-one is going to be haunted by the ghost of Micah-Past.” Except… That couldn’t be the case because he didn’t remember a future tenant appearing in the studio.
So it didn’t come as a surprise when Ximena said, “No! I can’t let anyone else move in there. It’s cursed.”
“Yeah, I don’t think sprinkling holy water on the rug is going to help. You going to call the news?”
“And have them all up in my business, harassing the tenants? No. Does anyone else know about this besides Cosmo? I don’t want this to become some… some meme.”
That probably wasn’t the word she meant to use, but Micah said, “I don’t want that either.” The last thing he needed was more people knocking on his door. “I told an acquaintance about it, but she doesn’t want anything to do with it.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised.” She patted his cheek. “Go get your essentials packed up. And your art – I don’t want anyone else touching it. I’ll send some people for your bed, your desk, whatever you need today.”
Micah started to thank her, but her mouth parted, gaze darting to his front door.
“Oh no. Twenty-two was mad that the base heater had scorched the leg of their nightstand, and they wanted maintenance to check it. They said it kept kicking on even when it was unplugged. I didn’t believe them, of course, but now.
.. And someone else mentioned phantom smells.
I’ve had far more strange complaints than normal lately.
” She rubbed her face and leaned against the balcony railing. “I think I need to lie down.”
He supposed it made sense that the apartment next to his was affected, though how one would figure out the magnitude of such a hiccup in spacetime was beyond him.
Did it extend beyond the complex to the street below?
There could be a specific spot in the parking lot where a car from the past might suddenly appear in a driver’s path, or a rose bush that seemed to always have roses no matter how often you cut them.
“This is the Artists’ District. Maybe you can market it as a feature instead of a bug. The eccentric ones will go for it.”
Ximena shook her head, mouth pulled into a grim line. “I should retire early is what I should do.”
“Who lived in twenty-six three years ago?” The last thing he needed was to move into a new apartment with more disturbances than his current one.