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Abigail wakes up.
Her hand immediately flies up to her left ear, and she doesn’t quite know why she’s so relieved when it comes away dry and clean. Her memories are charred around the edges like an ancient tome, and the pounding ache in her head and neck discourages her from trying to recall their contents.
She is in a dim room, sitting in an armchair, and the air is heavy around her with whispers that she cannot discern. They speak another language, or maybe she does.
The floor is painted in a maze-like pattern, and thick red velvet curtains ring the room’s diameter. There are no windows, there is no door, but Abigail doesn’t feel trapped. She feels comfortable and safe, like nothing can hurt her here. She begins to think, in fact, that nothing can hurt her anymore, anywhere-- but despite the strength of that conviction, she can’t recall its source.
Abigail isn’t sure if the chair across from her had always been there, but now there is a girl sitting in it, staring at her. The girl’s hair is blonde, cascading in waves down the front of her long black dress, and her eyes are infinitely kind. Somehow Abigail knows immediately that this girl is like her, that her clear gaze hides strata of pain and guilt and sin.
“,ygele ruoy si sihT” the girl says.
“I don’t understand,” Abigail says, looking around in confusion. “Where am I?”
Wordlessly, the girl reaches forward, and with one swift movement, unties Abigail’s scarf from around her neck. The square of fabric drops to the floor, and Abigail instinctively reaches down to pick it up, feeling naked and exposed without it, but her fingers scrape the chevron panels fruitlessly. The scarf is gone.
“,devloser ,egamad ruoY” the girl explains, like it’s the simplest thing in the world, and she raises her hands in an elegant gesture.
Abigail’s brows knit together in confusion as she touches the spot on her neck where her scar is-- where her scar was. The skin there is unsullied, smooth, and suddenly it’s all so obvious.
“I’m dead,” she whispers, and the red room tilts and blurs around her, space warping and twisting as if reality itself was glitching. The whispers amplify in volume until Abigail is screaming, her hands around her head, as shrieking shadows of birds dive past and lights flicker like an electrical storm. Pain rips through her upper body, she is being severed from herself, from the world; the demons have come, and she is alone--
Then everything is quiet again, and Abigail feels weightless. The girl is still sitting across from her, smiling gently, her golden hair like a halo lit by an invisible sun.
“My name is Laura Palmer,” she says.
“I’m Abigail Hobbs,” says Abigail, but she has a feeling that Laura already knew that.
Slowly, Abigail stands up. She walks past Laura, past the lamps and the statue, and towards the red curtains that form the room’s walls. She pushes through them, and, as naturally as crossing a threshold, emerges on the opposite side of the same room, behind the chair she had been sitting in.
She settles back down in her chair and says, "Just making sure."
There is silence, and then there is music, and Abigail cannot tell if the melody is echoing through the room or inside her head.
“You’re dead too?” she asks.
Laura nods. “It was a long time ago. I don’t like to think of myself as dead, though. The concept doesn’t really do this place justice.”
“And this place is…?” Abigail says. She has known death all of her life, in its varied forms and functions, and she’d had a lot of opportunities-- far too many, probably-- to consider the nature of what came after. But in all her daydreams and nightmares, among the fiery infernos and the ceaseless voids and the joyous Edens, she has never thought to consider a crimson room with comfortable chairs and haunting, jazzy music.
“This is the Red Room,” Laura says.
“No shit,” says Abigail. “Nice curtains.”
Laura laughs, and her smile is beautiful and dangerous. Abigail wonders if she’s ever killed anyone.
“The Red Room is the Black Lodge, and it is also the White Lodge, and it is also neither,” says Laura, and points to the patterned floor by way of an explanation. “It cleaves to the skin of the world you know. Spirits pass through here. Some stay. Some cannot leave.”
“How did I get here?” Abigail asks. She is nothing if not persistent; years under her father’s wing taught her the importance of getting her bearings, assessing the situation.
“The key to entrance is fear,” says Laura distractedly, as if reciting a dictionary definition. “An act of brutal murder, usually.”
Abigail’s fists clench, and tears well up in her eyes. She is remembering. “Hannibal,” she whispers. “I wasn’t-- I thought he was-- God, I was so stupid--” A keening sob emerges from her throat, unbidden, and she is embarrassed at her lack of control. Her father would be ashamed. Her father, his eyes dark, his mind clear, his girl-trophies and knives and his heart as black as the woods--
Laura is right in front of Abigail, crouching down and holding her hands.
“Will Graham thought he could save me,” Abigail says, looking up into the void that is the Red Room’s ceiling, blinking, trying to draw the tears back through her eyes. Was that Will’s face that she saw, swimming before her, or was it just the stars? “I thought I could make him save me, but I wasn’t worth it. I deserved this, didn’t I--”
“Why do you say that?” Laura asks, and her questioning tone reminds Abigail uncomfortably of Hannibal’s therapeutic efforts.
“Don’t you know what I did?” Abigail says, her anger defensive. She feels uncomfortably visible here, like her soul has been bared. Abigail is positive that Laura knows more about her than her father did, than Hannibal did-- perhaps more than she herself ever did, and that is terrifying.
“Maybe. It doesn’t matter,” says Laura. “When girls like us die, and we come here, it is because we are sacrifices.”
“Girls like us? Are there others?”
“Too many,” Laura answers. “We are a means to an end.”
Abigail thinks she’s getting it, now. “I survived,” she says. “I survived for so long, and for what? For this? To be forgotten, to be reviled?”
“Antlers and plastic and rope,” Laura says. It is a mantra. “Knives through our skin. Blood in our mouths. One chants out between two worlds…”
Words come to Abigail’s mind, and she speaks them, knowing they are not her own: “Fire walk with me.”
Laura stands up, walks behind Abigail and places her hands on Abigail’s shoulders, and they both gaze forward. The chair Laura had been sitting in is gone now, and in its place stands a man. A brilliant spotlight shines on him from nowhere, so that his features are obscured, and he’s silhouetted starkly against the red curtains. And Abigail knows him--
“Will?” she breathes, daring herself to hope.
“Yes, he is Will Graham,” says Laura, “and he is also Dale Cooper, and he is the guardian of our altar. He is not innocent, but his faults are in the world that surrounds him, not in his heart.”
A different man appears, and Abigail shrinks back in her chair, away from the aura of menace that radiates from his form. It’s her father-- no, it’s Hannibal-- no, he has long gray hair and a grin like murder--
“This is my father, and he is your father,” Laura says. “He is Hannibal Lecter, and he is BOB, and he is the monster under the bed.”
And now Abigail is staring at herself, reflected as in a pool of still water, only her eyes are pale, cloudy blue and blood drips from her head and her neck-- and then she is Laura, grey-faced, blue-lipped and screaming silently-- and she is a girl with long, frizzy red hair and antlers bound to her head, naked and cold--
Abigail turns away, covers her eyes, she can’t bear it anymore-- and when she opens them again, the horrors are gone, Laura is once more sitting in front of her.
“Have you ever heard the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice?” Laura asks calmly.
Abigail shakes her head as she steadies herself with deep, calming breaths. “I never really paid much attention in English,” she says. “The stories were all the same, anyway, and I had other things to worry about.”
Laura smiles. “That’s right. One story.”
She holds her hands up in a triangle shape, her index fingers and thumbs touching to form three points, and it frames her mouth as she begins to speak.
“In ancient Greece, when gods still walked with mortals and the great stories of the world were yet to be written, a young man named Orpheus married a beautiful nymph named Eurydice. Orpheus had a talent for music, and he would sing to Eurydice as they walked and danced and made love.
“The day after their wedding, Eurydice was bitten by a poisonous snake while walking through a field, and she died. Orpheus was so overcome by grief that he refused to accept Eurydice’s death, and so, accompanied only by his lyre and the strength of his desire, he ventured into the underworld to retrieve her.
“Orpheus played his lyre for Hades, king of the dead, and sang of his love for Eurydice. Hades was moved by this display of affection, and so agreed to let Eurydice leave his domain, on one condition: Orpheus must not look back to see if she was truly there.
“So Orpheus journeyed out of the land of the dead. He crossed the Styx and the Lethe, and he did not look back. He traversed Elysium, and he walked the Asphodel Meadows, and he did not look back. The souls of the damned clawed at his ankles, and the screams of the cursed tore at his ears, and he did not look back.”
Abigail interrupts: “But he did look back, didn’t he? Eventually?”
“I thought you said you’d never heard this story,” Laura says, lowering her triangle.
It’s Abigail’s turn to smile now. “I told you, those stories are all the same. Men, blinded by their love, by the glint of sunlight off their swords. Or lyres, I guess. They never do the right thing, do they?”
“You’re right,” says Laura. “Just as Orpheus reached the gates of Hades’ domain, the thought occurred to him that maybe Hades had tricked him, and Eurydice wasn’t there at all. So just as he crossed the threshold into the world of the living, he turned around, and saw his beloved about to cross over behind him. But their eyes met before she could step through the gates, and she was dragged back into the underworld, where Orpheus could not reach her.”
“Huh,” says Abigail. “Moral of the story: watch out for snakes?”
They both giggle; a small moment of levity shared beneath the pressing weight of the velvet curtains around them.
"But that is how the story goes," Laura says, serious again. "Eurydice is me, and she is you, and we are the crux of their journeys. We are metaphors, symbols, altarpieces and talismans for the men and the demons."
"But we're not," Abigail cries out. "We're people!"
"You'd think," says Laura. "But I was a picture in a frame, and you are--"
"An ear," murmurs Abigail.
Then there is solemn silence. Laura seems to be waiting for Abigail to speak.
"No offense," Abigail finally says, "you look like you're my age, but you don't talk like it. How long have you been de-- how long have you been here?"
"Twenty-five years," Laura says. "But that's not quite true, because I've been here forever, and also for no time at all."
"See, that's what I mean," says Abigail, "about you not sounding like a teenager."
Laura shrugs. “I wasn’t the first,” she says, “but I was the first who stayed here, to tell our story. And I’ve been telling this story for a long time, Abigail. These words are well-practiced.” She twirls a lock of golden hair around her finger wistfully.
And now Abigail is crying again, because her heart tells her that everything Laura has shown her is true, and it is all so brutally unfair. She is dead, and so is Laura, and their deaths were not their own.
Abigail stands up, but before she can try to escape, out through the curtains and the endless loop of spatial symmetry that is the Black Lodge, Laura moves towards her and folds her into an embrace.
After a while, Laura lets go and takes a step back, but she stays close to Abigail, speaking softly. “There was one girl, Dora Lange,” she says, and Abigail knows somehow that Laura is referring to the girl with the antlers she had seen earlier, “and she told me that time is a flat circle. That we all go around, and around, repeating ourselves like actors in a play, putting on a show.”
“God, that sounds awful,” says Abigail, and she is shaking. “Why are you telling me this? Is there some deep meaning here, some hidden truth? Am I like, the-- the chosen one, or something? What do you want me to do?” Her words rise into a choking sob.
“Abigail Hobbs,” says Laura, “you must make a choice.”
“Heaven or hell?” Abigail guesses. “Light or dark?”
“No,” Laura says, like Abigail is a naive child. She supposes she is, though. “It used to go like this, see: a sacrifice would be made, me or you or Eurydice or Dora Lange, and they would pass right through to the after, and reenter that flat circle of myth and death. But then I came here, and I stayed here, and I made it into a place of rest-- a stopping point, if you will. And I listen, and I guide, and I atone.”
Laura guides Abigail towards a section of the curtained wall, indistinguishable from the rest of the velvet drapery that rings the room. She pulls it aside, and beyond it is a pulsing nothingness that calls to some deep, primal aspect of Abigail’s being, tugs at her heart.
“You can leave,” Laura says, “and move on, knowing what you know now. Many girls choose this path.”
“Or?”
“Or you can stay.”
“Here?”
Laura nods. “This was a dangerous place, before I came, and sometimes it still is. They say that the White Lodge was a paradise, before the men and the devils, but now it vies with the Black Lodge for dominance. I’ve tried to help the light win, keep the ones who are after their garmonbozia away, but I’m no powerful spirit. I’m just a dead teenage girl. I can’t beat back the dark on my own.”
Abigail is following Laura’s train of thought. “And you want me to help… help bring the White Lodge back? Make a place for girls like us to go?”
“Something like that,” says Laura. “I’m six feet under Twin Peaks and you’re dinner. What have you got to lose?”
Abigail thinks. She thinks of Will and Hannibal and herself arranged, like the three points of Laura’s triangle: Guardian. Demon. Sacrifice. She thinks of her father, and she thinks of the knife thrusting deep into Nicholas Boyle’s gut. Every atom in her body is straining towards the welcoming nullity beyond the red curtain, but Abigail has never been one to take the easy way out. She fought until the very end, against Hannibal’s wicked grasp and the universal mechanics of belief that brought his knife to her ear, and her spirit to this room.
She thinks she knows what to do, now.
Abigail says nothing, but maybe it is the shift in her body language that causes Laura to slowly lower the curtain until the nothingness is gone. Then she raises it up again, and there is a room beyond it, identical to the one they are in now, except crowded with girls. They are waiting for her.
One of the girls waves to Abigail, and she waves back tentatively.
“Go on,” says Laura.
And Abigail steps through.