Chapter 50 - Congratulations, Bo: Part II
Time unknown - Place unknown
Walking down along the dark, wet street, Bo looked around with great caution.
She saw some old style rotary pay phone beside her. They looked like something Trick would use. However, she noticed that they all had a small display screen above the dialer. It was something she had never seen on those old fashioned phones.
A man walked pass by her in a hurry, almost running into her. Instead of apologizing, he shot her a cold stare, before he went back talking to a device that was strapped to his wrist like a watch.
Out of curiosity, Bo took a glance at the device. It looked like some sort of phone, only the display was black and white.
Is this some sort of theme park? She asked herself as she looked at all the buildings. They seemed to have been powered by steam. Then, she noticed that there was a flying vessel hovering far away. It looked like a hybrid of a vintage car and a fish. As it moved, the "fins" on its sides expanded in flutters.
Shaking her head slightly, she told herself that she needed to first figure out where she was. She took out her phone, and just like she had expected, there wasn't a single bar of signal.
She sighed, before she turned to a pair of pay phones a few feet away from her. One of them is occupied, so she went into the other booth.
The phone wouldn't take her quarters. Instead, a line of text popped out on the screen, asking for identifications.
Bo growled and walked out. She knocked on the door of the other booth, thinking maybe the woman inside could help her, but the woman gave her a cautious frown and practically fled.
What's wrong with all these people? Bo frowned. She tried to ask a passer-by, an old man, for help, but he just shook his head without stopping.
She tried to charm him, and to her surprise, she seemed to have lost her glow.
Stunned, she stepped back and blankly stared at the advertisement board across the street. It was about some nightclub called Barrowland Ballroom. The display said it would be closed indefinitely due to recent incidents.
Barrowland Ballroom? That sounds awfully familiar. Bo thought. Then, the billboard changed its display into some sort of missing persons notice.
A woman's picture was shown, with the name "Mrs Patricia Docker" under it. The notice claimed that she had been murdered, and urged those who had seen her to come forward and call the police.
Right, the police. Bo told herself as she tried to find a police officer in the street.
Eventually, she found a booth with "police" displayed on top. No one was inside, but there was a huge computer-like device.
She went in and messed around with the device until a police officer's face showed up as black and white image on the screen.
"Langside police, what's your emergency?" The officer slurred languishly while looking at somewhere else.
"I...ummm..." Bo muttered. She wanted to tell the police officer that she needed help, but she wondered how she should start. Telling people that she had no idea where she was or how she had gotten here sounded delusional, and with her charms gone she didn't want to be locked up. Besides, after having seen so many people refusing to help her, she thought she'd better play safe.
"Miss?" The officer raised his eyebrows. "If you do not have an emergency, please get out."
"I do, I do," Bo said while thinking: I need to get into the station first. Some of them gotta know someone who knows Dyson or maybe Tamsin.
As the officer impatiently urged her to state her emergency again, she unconsciously stared at the billboard and blurted in panic, "I have some...information regarding the...the Docker murder."
Time unknown - Langside Police Station
The moment Bo entered the police station, she was stunned to see that everything in there was like nothing she had seen before, not in real life anyway.
She saw the officers using the same wrist device for communications. The computers they were using looked like old TVs being hooked to typewriters and gramophones.
Before she had a chance to explain why she really came into the station, she was escorted into an interrogation room.
The officer, who had escorted her there, offered her a glass of hot drink. Then, he walked out and closed the door behind him.
Bo took a sip, and then put the drink down while spitting quietly. The funky taste of the bitter herb and tart fruit lingered on her tongue, making her squeeze her eyes hard.
"Someone came forward on my case?" Bo heard a woman's voice outside the door. That voice sounded so strangely familiar to her.
"Yes," the officer replied.
"Great, I certainly hope that she actually knows something," the woman said. "I need to crack this case before the killer kills more women."
As the door knob turned, Bo thought, oh Gods, how am I gonna tell her that I actually don't know anything about her case and that I just need help?
As the woman walked in, Bo's eyes shot wide open. She gaped at the leather-wearing, gun-wielding woman, and exclaimed, "Tamsin?!"
The woman, who looked exactly like Tamsin, frowned at Bo as if she found the name "Tamsin" insulting. She shook her head and rolled her eyes, before she slammed her case folder into the table. "Please don't call me that," she told Bo. "My name is Thomasina. Tho-ma-si-na. It's not that hard to pronounce."
"Tamsin, hey!" Bo jumped out from the chair and approached the other woman. "It's me. I'm Bo. What are you-what are you doing here? Why do you dress like this?"
"Do I know you?" The other woman frowned at Bo again.
Bo opened her mouth and stared at her in silence as she started to wonder if this really wasn't a prank but reality. Even though the woman in front of her looked exactly like Tamsin, there was something missing in her light eyes.
The woman didn't know her. To her, Bo was a stranger. There was no connection. There was no love, or passion, or even a single trace of affection in them.
Bo cleared her throat as she sat back down. She stared at the woman, Thomasina, for a while, before she murmured, "so...you are really not Tamsin?"
Thomasina rolled her eyes again. "I don't know who the hell that is, but it's certainly not me."
"Okay…" Bo muttered. So she's just someone who looks exactly like Tamsin? How strange is that?!
"Now, you called the station saying that you have information regarding the Docker murder," Thomasina said to Bo as she opened her file folder, where a bunch of black and white photos slipped out. "Tell me everything."
"I...actually, I..." Bo stuttered as she tried to figure out a good way to tell this Thomasina that the real reason that she had come into the station was looking for help.
"Come on, spit it out," Thomasina demanded impatiently while reorganizing her folder. While she was doing that, Bo caught a glimpse of a photo that was apparently taken from a murder scene. It was a woman's dead body. She was completely naked, with strangulation bruises on her neck. From the woman's face, Bo recognized her as Patricia Docker, the murder victim mentioned on the billboard.
She frowned at that picture, because it, too, looked awfully familiar. As she connected the scene, the woman's face, her name and the name of the Barrowland Ballroom, she suddenly realized that why they all seemed so familiar.
She had heard of them before. She had even seen a crime scene photo exactly like this one. It was from the Bible John case, a case thought to have been committed by her uncle, her dad's twin brother.
"Of course..." she murmured, as she remembered that Patricia Docker was the first victim in that case, and the Barrowland Ballroom was the nightclub where the killer had met all three victims.
"Of course what? What do you know about this case?" Thomasina demanded again.
Bo closed her wide open mouth and turned to look at her. "Actually, I mean, I can't believe that I'm gonna say this but...I know everything about this case."
There was a brief moment of silence, where Bo started to wonder if she had travelled back to the past. She quickly told herself no, since everything she saw here wasn't like anything in history. But, if she hadn't travelled back in time, how could she possibly meet someone who was working on the Bible John's case? And more importantly, this person looked exactly like Tamsin.
Bo wondered if she might actually be Tamsin, because if this was the past, they shouldn't have met each other yet and Tamsin wouldn't be able to recognize her. Though, she quickly shook her head at that idea because she knew for sure that Tamsin had not worked on the Bible John case.
Thomasina snapped her fingers in front of Bo's face, and pulled the Succubus out from her train of thoughts. "Hey, don't tune me out. Tell me, what do you know about this case?"
"I'm sorry," Bo cleared her throat. "I...ummm, I mean it when I said that I know everything about this case. The killer is a male. He met all his victims in Barrowland Ballroom. They were all raped and strangled. He dumped their bodies in different sites…."
As she mentioned more and more details of the case, Thomasina's face became dead serious. She eventually stopped Bo, and asked, "who are you? How the hell do you know these details?"
"I...read them somewhere," Bo replied.
"That's not possible. Most of them aren't published anywhere. The only persons that know these many details, should be the killer, or whoever that has worked on this case."
"Well..." Bo shrugged.
Thomasina studied her carefully. At one point, Bo saw her reaching for her gun, but instead of pulling it out, Thomasina just leaned in and said, "I get it. You probably have read it somewhere, like from one of the investigators who worked on this case previously."
"Well, you could say that, but it's quite different than you think," Bo said.
"Then, you don't know anything more than I do," Thomasina concluded with her arms crossed in front of her chest.
"I wouldn't say that," Bo replied. "At least I know who the killer is."
Thomasina snorted. "Bullshit," she said. "I've worked on this case for months, and I couldn't even get a single person to give me a usable sketch of the killer. And now you are telling me that you know who the killer is?"
Bo frowned. "Wait, what do you mean by you don't have a sketch of the killer? Haven't you interviewed the third victim's sister yet?"
Thomasina furrowed her eyebrows. She examined the look on Bo's face again, before she said, "are you suggesting that I should interview the third victim's sister?"
"Well, yeah, she's the only witness who has shared a cab with the killer. She also had a few conversation with him in the ballroom and in the cab," Bo said. "Her name is Jean-"
"-Mclachlan," Thomasina interrupted her.
"Oh, so you do know her," Bo said. "She didn't help you with a sketch?"
"No, she didn't," Thomasina told Bo with a cold voice, "because she's dead too."
"What?!" Bo exclaimed. "No, no she's not. She's not supposed to die until 2010."
Knowing that her words were beyond confusing, she added, "I mean, why do you say that she's dead?"
"Because she is," Thomasina told her as she showed Bo a crime scene photo with a dead woman. She had similar injuries just like all the other victims. "She's the fourth victim, and of course as someone who knows everything about this case, you sure as hell should know that, right?"
"No, this is not right," Bo murmured. "There wasn't a fourth victim. There were only three victims. After the third victim, the killer stopped and vanished. They never found him."
"No, there are over twenty victims so far," Thomasina corrected her. "And the number is still growing."
To convince Bo, she briefly showed her all the crime scene photos, before she closed the folder.
Beyond shocked, Bo licked her lips anxiously. Then, she looked at Thomasina and asked, "what year is this? Where am I?"
Thomasina seemed to have found her questions ridiculous, but she eventually answered her, "it's 1981, and you are in Glasgow-"
"-Scotland?"
Thomasina frowned. "Where the hell is Scotland? You are in Glasgow, Northern Kingdom."
"What is Northern Kingdom?" Bo asked, for she had never heard of a country with that name.
"Umm...Northern Kingdom, as in Northern Kingdom?" Thomasina replied. When she noticed the genuine confusion in Bo's eyes, she asked, "what's your name again? And please show me your PI card."
"I don't think-I don't think PIs have cards," Bo murmured.
Thomasina sighed. "So you are telling me that you don't have a Personal Identification card?"
"I have no idea what that is," Bo replied. "Unless you mean my driver's license."
Apparently Thomasina had no idea what that was. She stared at Bo for a long time, before she said, "wait here."
She didn't wait for Bo's reply. She didn't really need one anyway. She cuffed Bo to the table with a strange device, and left the room.
"Wow, maybe she's Tamsin's evil twin," Bo murmured as she struggled against the device in vain.
- Meanwhile at Nursing Home -
Trick kept flipping the pages in his old book, but he was having a hard time concentrating. Every five minutes, he'd check on Bo while wondering if they could actually save her in time.
He flinched when the door was flung open. He turned around and saw Tamsin storm in.
"Have you found anything?" He asked.
Tamsin bit her lips. "I found two Yama-ubas in town, but...but both of them are now like Lillian. Their minds are no longer here. They can't talk. They can't walk. They don't respond to anything."
"That sounds...weird," Trick commented.
"That sounds like some serious shit is going on," Tamsin said as she walked to Bo's side. She squeezed the brunette's hand gently. "Did you find anything in your books?"
"So far, nothing," Trick admitted. "Although, one of them did make a reference to an exit."
"An exit, good, great. That sounds like something we want, right? That's exactly what we want, an exit."
"Yeah, if the exit is the exit that we think it is. It could be a metaphor for something else too," Trick explained. "Anyway, I'll keep digging."
"Me too, while hoping that she stays alive in there."
3:45 pm - Police Station
After what seemed to have been forever, Thomasina came back. She sat down at the table and stared at Bo with her sharp eyes. "You are not in the system," she announced.
"Well, probably because I'm not from this...Northern Kingdom?"
"Oh, really? Then where are you from?"
"North America…?" Bo said.
Thomasina snorted, "right, and I must be from Mars then."
"Is there a problem that I'm from North America? What do people not live there anymore? I mean, now?"
"I'm sure they do, if they can breathe 2000 feet under the sea," Thomasina said.
"What do you mean by that? The North America continent is under the sea?!" Bo exclaimed.
"And you don't know that?" Thomasina furrowed her eyebrows.
"North America is under the sea?! Where the hell am I?" Bo exclaimed.
"Let's not worry about that," Thomasina gave her a fake smile. "Explain to me, woman. Why are you not in the system?"
Bo shrugged. "System glitch? Or...maybe because I am not local?"
"The system doesn't glitch, and local or not, you should be in it," Thomasina hissed. "Unless of course, you are from some imaginary world."
Her words made Bo frown. It made her think about the things had happened before here. She was meeting this old lady, Lillian, with Tamsin in a nursing home. She tried to talk to her, but the lady wouldn't respond. She tried to charm her, and the lady suddenly gripped her.
She sucked her in. As ridiculous as it sounded, that was the best description Bo could come up with. Lillian sucked her mind in, and the next thing she knew was herself wandering in a place where everything looked so familiar yet so strange. The weird outfits. The strange devices. The way everything worked and everyone behaved.
Wherever this place was, this wasn't the world she had known and lived in, not even in its past. The only reasonable explanation right now would be that somehow she entered another world, as crazy as it would sound.
"Well..." Bo murmured. "What if...what if I tell you that I might not be from this world at all?"
She thought she'd make Thomasina laugh, but the blonde didn't. She just moved her eyes back and forth between Bo's face and her case files, before she murmured, "either you are crazy, or I am."
"Or, neither of us are crazy, because I am telling the truth and no matter how hard I pinch myself I am not waking up," Bo said.
Thomasina pondered for a long time, before she told Bo, "there's someone I'd like you to meet."
- Meanwhile at One of the Yama-uba's Place -
Tamsin figured that there must be a connection between all three Yama-ubas, so she went to the other Yama-uba's places looking for clues.
She noticed one thing: all three of them seemed to have had a visitor shortly before they lost their conscious mind. And when she found out that one of them had a camera set up at her home, she immediately requested the video feeds.
A few hours later, the footages that had been recorded by the camera was sent to her phone. She watched every one of them.
The video didn't tell her how the Yama-uba had become this way, but it did catch the visitor when that person left her place.
The video showed the visitor's face in a split second. Since the resolution was low, Tamsin sent the image to the tech team, hoping that they could give her a better image.
The tech team did return her a better result later, and when Tamsin took a look at it, her eyes shot wide open in horror.
"Shit..." she murmured. Fear seized her heart.
5:15pm - Clock Tower
"Wow..." Bo murmured as she raised her head to look at the clock tower in the city square. The massive structure creeped out from the darkness. There must be at least twenty clocks on there, each showing a different time. A few flying vessels were hovering around the tip of the roof.
"Come on, hotpants," Thomasina called Bo in a whisper as she pulled Bo's sleeve.
That familiar nickname made Bo chuckle. She followed the blonde into the clock tower through a side door that looked like a sheet of rusty metal piece.
After climbing up along the long, narrow spiral staircase, going through countless secret doors and dodging some mechanism inside the clock that almost chopped Bo's head off, they arrived in a small room.
From the colorful glasses and the shadows cast on them, Bo knew this room must be behind the big clock in the middle of the clock tower.
She looked around, trying to figure out why Thomasina had taken her here, but all she could see were machines, lab equipments and old furniture.
"Who's there?!" A female's voice came to her.
"Me," Thomasina replied simply.
Bo heard some lazy grunts, and then something on the wall lit up. It looked like a jar of huge fireflies, only the fireflies were engineered from glass and metal.
Someone stood up behind a table full of journal books, containers and electronic devices. It was a girl with messy hair, and she stared at Bo very cautiously while holding up a big firearm.
"Kenzi?!" Bo exclaimed in joy as she saw the girl's face. Even though she knew that this might not be her best friend Kenzi, she still felt a bit relieved to see a familiar face.
"Hey, who are you and how do you know my name?" The girl asked Bo in a voice that sounded rather robotic.
"She's nobody," Thomasina told her. She glanced at Bo, before she added, "but I think she might be a traveller."
Kenzi put down her firearm. She approached Bo slowly until her nose was practically touching Bo's. She put on a monocular and examined Bo, before she asked, "ya think she's a traveller?"
"She's not in the system. She doesn't have a PI card. She talks about weird crap. She seems to know a lot shit about a case that I'm working on. I mean, a lot of shit, like shit I don't even know about. So, you tell me," Thomasina said.
"Well, have you considered the possibility that she might be the killer?" Kenzi suggested. "And she might also be...crazy?"
"Oh, believe me, I have," Thomasina replied, "but being a killer and being a nutjob won't explain this." With that she handed Kenzi Bo's personal belongings.
Kenzi examined everything carefully. She sniffed the cash Bo was carrying, and then she frowned at her credit card and driver's license.
Then, she looked down at Bo's phone. When she accidentally turned the screen on, she flinched. Then she frowned while checking out the apps on the phone. "Hmmm..." she hummed.
Thomasina raised her eyebrows at her.
"Maybe you are right, my friend. Maybe she is a traveller," Kenzi concluded after she put down the phone.
"Can either of you explain to me what a traveller is and what is going on?" Bo asked. "I mean, where the hell am I?"
"You, my friend," Kenzi said as she squeezed Bo's shoulder. "You are a wanderer, a traveller. You've come to a place that you shouldn't have. You are from somewhere else, like another world that is...that is kinda similar to this but, you know, different. You may also find a few familiar faces here, but they are actually the ones you know in your world."
"You mean...this is like a parallel universe?" Bo blurted.
"Yes! That's exactly what I mean," Kenzi exclaimed as she grabbed a journal. She quickly wrote it down. "Parallel universe, yes, that's it. We should totally call this parallel universe."
"So...how do I get out of here?" Bo asked.
"That, my friend, I do not know," Kenzi said, "but, I've heard of rumors about this exit. Maybe that's where you should go."
"An exit? Where is it?" Bo asked.
Kenzi shrugged. She went to the bookshelf and tossed a few books to Bo. "You may or may not find your answer in these books," she explained. "And be careful. If the Crimson Watchers catch you, you are dead."
"The Crimson Watchers?" Bo frowned.
"You know, the patrols in red uniforms? They have this salamander pattern tattooed on their arms?" Kenzi told Bo. After having realized that Bo had no idea what she was talking about, she shrugged, "never mind."
Bo let out a deep breath and picked up a heavy book that Kenzi had given her. Before she started to read, Thomasina forced her to close it.
"Hold on," the blonde told Bo. "My case first."
"What about your case?"
"You said you know who the killer is," Thomasina said. "Who is he?"
Bo bit her bottom lip. She thought it might be okay to tell Thomasina that it was her uncle, but then she thought, if this world wasn't her world, how could she be sure that the killer was the same person?
"I do know who the killer is in my world. I'm not sure if it's the same guy here," she told Thomasina honestly. "If...if you would let me read all the case files, I might be able to tell you whether it's him or not, but, you have to help me get back to my world later."
"Deal," Thomasina nodded.
7:20 pm - Thomasina's Place
Thomasina took Bo to her apartment: a small studio with all kinds of weird things. While she was looking for that exit Kenzi had talked about in the books, Bo started to look into the case files.
The reading was exhausting, and the amount of death and blood in this case made her feel upset. Though, she was surprised that there were surveillance footages from places near some of the crime scenes.
She decided to watch them. The tedious, black and white videos made her sleepy. Before she closed her eyes, though, she caught a glimpse of a face in one scene.
Another look at that face, she felt the hair on the back of her neck stand. "Of course," she murmured.
"Of course what?" Thomasina asked absentmindedly. When she heard no answers from Bo, she raised her head and looked into Bo's eyes.
"You said you questioned everyone that has appeared in these video clips," Bo said.
"I did," Thomasina nodded. "None of is the killer."
"Have you-" Bo pointed at the pale face on the screen. "Have you questioned him?"
"Him? No, of course not," Thomasina snorted. "He's just a kid. He's like ten years old. He can't be the killer."
"I wouldn't be so sure if I were you," Bo said firmly as she stared at that familiar, pale face. "I know him. I know how much blood he has on his hands. I have no idea how he got here, or if he belongs to this world at all, but I'm telling you, you definitely want to find him."
Thomasina straightened her body. "Who is this kid?"
"He's my twin brother, a born serial killer."
TO BE CONTINUED...
A/N: At first I was just planning on having Bo travel to the past to solve the Bible John case, but I thought a steampunk parallel universe might be more fun in this story.
Thanks for reading. Hope everyone enjoys this fic.
