A small island in an endless sea.
His long work is done. The only whispers in the trees now are the rustlings of wind in tangled emerald limbs. On the island floating in the middle of every ocean, Walt Lloyd now sits alone, the ghosts of his father's people exorcised forevermore.
A small fire crackles at his feet, exposing features grown rugged and mature over 5 years of hiking, fishing, and farming on the surface of the verdant isle he learned to call home so long ago. His hair has been shorn, leaving only a thin sheet of dark over his scalp. He feels freer marooned on this spit of sand than he ever did in the "real world".
That's the term. That's how he always thinks of it. The "real world", as if he'd stepped through the looking glass and found himself in a fantasy. Yet there was something more tangible, more real in this fantasy than in the bricks and mortar of civilization.
This place wasn't his responsibility. Not yet anyway. Hugo stood sentinel over the island, becoming one with it and knowing its secrets instinctively. Even in his now infinite wisdom, Hugo was the same man he'd been. Though he knew the secrets of the deep magic that came from the magnetic wonder at the island's core, he still came from his roaming cabin in the woods to play backgammon on the shoreline each day. This simple, innate humanity was what made him suited to the job, perhaps suited to carry it on forever.
Walt's capacity on the island was less clear. Rescued from an institution and given asylum here, he'd wandered the woods, feeling passing ghosts chill his every step. It took time and learning to see them, to know them almost as flesh and blood rather than as feelings or impressions or glimpses from the corner of the eye. He met his father first. Weary and wretched, Michael was a shell of the man who'd first brought Walt to the island. Walt touched his shoulder and it was solid under his fingers, yet the breeze blew through his father's torso and lapped at his skin. There had been no words. The growth of his troubled son into a man of true knowledge moved Michael and forgave him in ways that words never could. He was gone the next morning, lost in light. The rest would follow.
Walt stokes the fire and stands. There's a clinking sound coming from the lighthouse he tends and inhabits that requires investigation. He hikes the sloping rocks that lead to the grassy finger of land the lighthouse juts from and enters, climbing slowly and deliberately to the top floor.
Reforged from the sands of the island by the lightning of a passing tempest, the mirrors dominating the towering lighthouse's mechanisms reflect darkness. At this moment the world is dark, but the darkness reflected is not a vision of the external lack of light, but of an internal lack of anything; a black like pitch that doesn't appear in the natural world.
Walt traces his hand over the names scratched into the dial. Most have been scratched out. Many applicants for a position already filled. Finally he settles on the one the mirrors reflect, 66 degrees; COOPER. Looking up again, he sees deeper into the darkness; into another place where old Douglas firs provide the whispers and beyond the trees into the world behind the veil.
Another place.
The horror never subsides. Meticulous in life and same in the half-life he now inhabits, Dale Cooper has kept count of every minute spent in this hell. Sometimes he finds himself counting numbers he's sure he'd passed earlier and sometimes he's suddenly much further along than he'd been seconds earlier. The subjective nature of time on Earth is magnified here in the Black Lodge. Relativity is heightened to such a degree that choosing a path through a hallway can shift one's frame of reference by days or months. Regardless he has continued his count. Like a prisoner scratching notches in the wall of some dank cell, waiting for the gallows, he counts. 25 years have passed. He's fairly certain of it. He saw Laura today. She kissed him, whispered knowledge he'd dreamed long ago into his ear, and vanished again. 25 years of objective time, perhaps a week of subjective time. Growing old in moments, this place had stolen his life and not even given him the courtesy of suffering for long enough to grow used to horror. No, the horror never subsides.
The other living souls trapped in the nether of the Lodge were not a comfort to him. His doppelganger was long gone, but he saw another mirror of himself tracking his steps from time to time. Out of the corner of his eye he'd see Agent Desmond, his dark mirror, lost in the madness of eternity.
This was a place of mirrors. Of reflections that made their subjects uglier, like some deranged artist had painted the world with the Lodge as his canvas. Wandering the endless scarlet curtained passages were the milky-eyed doubles of the people of Twin Peaks. Dale's memories of the real town were his most treasured possessions, yet he found them waning; Changing and distorting as he faced the warped visages of the people he'd come to love bearing down upon him.
Today, the first day he could hope this nightmare might end, he encountered the new height of its perversion. Soft blonde hair tangled in knots, clothes scratched and bloody, eyes dead and vacant, Annie Blackburn's shadow-self stood, fading in and out of his perception as blue light flickered from some unseen scaffold off the stage of the universe.
Dale crumbled. His hands shook like an alcoholic's, the temptation to drink from the glass of madness and despair now overwhelming.
"Annie?" He knew on some level that this wasn't her; that this was a tasteless parody of her existence, yet some part of him yearned to believe she was here. That he could still carry out the plan, save the girl, and return to his new rural paradise the valiant hero. Is this how they broke Desmond? He wondered. The delusion persisted.
"Th-ere i-s a wa-ay o-uut." the phantom intoned. Dale looked up into her face, saw only Annie now; only salvation.
"Show me."
"Th-ro-uugh th-e cuu-rrta-ins. Off st-age." Annie gestured and the scarlet draperies surrounding Dale began to slide away in perfect silence, as if drawn on greased cotton. Cold wind whipped at his skin and as he looked past the curtains his eyes began to water. His breath stopped in his throat. His skin clung to him like a screaming child clinging to its mother. The world beyond the curtains was not the forests of the Northwest. It was not Glastonbury Grove. It could not be described, only compared to the wildest visions of hell.
Dale shut his eyes and gripped his ears until his fingernails tore bloody gashes into his head. "Th-is iss a wai-ting ro-oom." the man had said, and now he understood. The Black Lodge was not a labyrinth of curtains and tile. That was just the façade, the sane alternative to the insane reality. To know the true form of the Lodge and its inhabitants was to know madness and the truth was pouring down on Dale's skull like acid rain. This was how they'd broken Desmond. This is how they would break him.
Suddenly, Dale felt a hand pull his own from his ear and clasp it. He felt himself being led rapidly this way and that, the savage wind lashing his back. He guessed he must be being led into that hell by Annie's shadow; finally united in torment with his lost love.
As he moved, though, he felt the tide of darkness waning. The winds subsided and faded. The howling of the damned disappeared. He opened his eyes to find himself being led not by Annie, but by a young man of intense countenance. This tall, dark-skinned spectre pulled him forward, his face locked in a mask of determination.
"Who are you?" Dale asked, sobering from his encounter with oblivion.
"I'm someone who can help you. I think. I've done this sort of thing before. Getting people out of the spots they're trapped in." The man was trying to sound sure of himself.
"You've seen this place before?"
"Ah… Not exactly."
They stopped in a square room. One of the infinite identical square rooms Cooper had found himself in in his time in the Lodge. Or perhaps they were all the same room. But this room, upon further inspection, was different. Where often a marble statue stood, there was instead a mirror; a looking glass of ornate design. The man stepped toward it slightly hesitantly, like a traveler who suspects he knows the way home, but is beginning to feel doubt at the unfamiliarity of his surroundings.
"What do you know about where these halls lead?" the man asked, his brown eyes fixed on Cooper's.
"I was told that with perfect courage this was the way to the White Lodge."
The man smiled, "White Lodge. I feel like I've heard that before; maybe in my sleep." He turned to face the looking glass, "Do you trust me?"
"I don't know who you are."
"My name is Walter Lloyd. I'm like you. I have the dreams. I see things. I can help."
Just then a piercing roar of rage tore through Walt's words. Dale turned to see the curtains at the other end of the room ripped open as Chester Desmond flew into the room. Standing with arms splayed wide and head down like an animal, the insanity that had gripped him was more apparent than ever.
Walt felt fear, "How were you supposed to reach this White Lodge?"
Dale stood completely still, the same fear magnified within himself, "I was told I would have to face my shadow self, the dweller at the threshold. That I would have to have perfect courage, but I failed. I was afraid."
"Well I think this is your second chance. It better be because the only other way I see out of here is dying." Walt looked around frantically, terrified at the pervasive unnatural atmosphere. The only magic here was pitch black, like the smoke that had haunted so many of his dreams. This cosmic black hole was somehow antithesis to the Island he called home, a doppelganger locus of sinister design.
Dale choked back tears of fear and despair. He looked up into the eyes of the man who'd come to Deer Meadows before him, of the man who'd lost himself there. In those mad, lost eyes he suddenly found clarity.
"I'm not a coward." he said in perfectly measured tone, "I was afraid to fail before, but I see now. I see you, the man who failed where I succeeded. The man who's path I've walked behind. The Scandinavians believe in something called a vardoger, a kind of doppelganger who walks ahead and takes your path before you do. I think that's what you are to me Agent Desmond, but not anymore. Because the path you've taken isn't mine anymore. I haven't failed. I've just been delayed for a while, but I'm going back now, back to set things right."
Agent Desmond's tortured face contorted and he charged screaming in an animal voice unlike anything Cooper had ever heard, except the voice of Leland Palmer, screaming in agony and ecstasy as his alter ego was revealed. Walt grabbed Dale by the hand and shoved him toward the mirror, which now rippled like gently drifting water.
Through the looking glass the wayward spirits tumbled, through darkness, then through blue, then into blinding white light. Pressure receded as Dale felt dampness on his skin, his clothes heavy with moisture, drawing him back toward the dark.
Walt's hand grasped his, pulled him back to the light, onto a sandy coastline edged with tall, billowing trees. The ocean stretched out forever in all directions.
Dale looked up into the sky and saw the sun eclipsed by Walt's grinning face, "Welcome to the White Lodge, Mr. Cooper."
"How did you- How did you know that would work?"
"I didn't, but I came to that place through my magic mirrors, I thought maybe we could get back the same way."
For the first time in 25 years, Dale smiled.
"Through the looking glass."