by Mark Frost
You’ve described to me what happened when you left with Cooper: The lights went out in the sheriff’s station. (I was there for that part.) You somehow found yourself in the basement of the Great Northern Hotel with Cooper. Something then “opened up” in a boiler room in the basement of the Great Northern, which you described as an “endless corridor.” You exchanged parting words. Cooper entered into it. This corridor, shortly thereafter, closed. Cooper was gone. You were back in what appeared to be, as far as you could determine by any other measure, an ordinary boiler room.
* * *
Okay.
There’s one last outlier in this fractured fairy tale that I feel the need to bring up now. References to him pop up far more than coincidence can account for, around the margins of this whole narrative. I’m speaking, centrally, of a man I never knew, a celebrated Bureau veteran, your former classmate and colleague, the man you called the “guiding inspiration” of the Blue Rose Task Force.
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION Field Office Criminal Investigative and Administrative Files
In Cooper’s files, he mentions a strange scene that supposedly took place in our Philadelphia offices in 1989. (I have not found any corroboration of this in other Bureau records, by the way: Did you have them erased?) Phillip Jeffries had been on an extended and highly classified Blue Rose assignment that involved a long-term posting in Buenos Aires, Argentina. At some point during that assignment, while working undercover, Jeffries disappeared—every bit as abruptly as Cooper disappeared from Twin Peaks twenty-five years ago, without a trace.
The difference being: On February 16, after spending six months completely off the Bureau’s radar, Phillip Jeffries showed up, without warning, in our offices in Philadelphia. He was wearing a white linen suit more appropriate for a tropical clime—it was the middle of a particularly nasty winter in Philadelphia, but summer in Argentina. Cooper described Jeffries as “distraught and disoriented.” When he asked and was told what date and year it was, Jeffries seemed generally horrified, and reacted with outright panic. He also seemed confused and troubled by Cooper’s being there and seemed to believe he wasn’t who he appeared to be. (Cooper indicated in his notes that this conversation took place in your office, Chief, and that you and Albert were also present.) Moments later, right in the middle of the conversation, apparently the three of you looked over and realized that Jeffries was gone. Vanished. And, as near as I can tell, the man was never seen or heard from again. Not in Philadelphia nor Buenos Aires—where Jeffries had, by the way, been seen by multiple witnesses in the lobby of his hotel that same morning, at roughly the same time, while wearing the same damn tropical outfit—or anywhere else on God’s green earth.
Two questions, Chief: How did Phillip Jeffries manage to be, or so it seems, in two places thousands of miles and a continent apart on the same day at the same time? Why was he so distraught upon learning what year it was? Why would he ask a question like that in the first place?
Let’s break this down. I’ve read every word I could find about Jeffries. He was, according to every account, a brilliant man, the only son of an old aristocratic Virginia family and a phenomenally talented law enforcement officer. One comment about him in all his profiles stood out for me: “This world wasn’t enough for him.” You yourself wrote that. You knew the man better than anyone else, and you and he founded the Blue Rose Task Force together. You’ve confirmed to me that Jeffries was deeply and openly interested in a variety of esoteric and occult subjects, including things that one could have ripped from the ripest pages of pulp science fiction.
I know the Blue Rose Task Force is charged with the investigation of matters that would make most average citizens—or the world’s most expert neurophysicists, for that matter—flee from the room with their hair spontaneously combusting. I know now that during its decades of operation, long before I came on the scene, you and Jeffries encountered phenomena that both of you struggled to understand or describe. What I went looking for was the moment when Phillip Jeffries stopped investigating these things and started living them.
The conclusion I would submit is this: It happened in Buenos Aires. I’ve tracked down the few scraps of information he left behind there, and one item in particular stands out. Although he went to Argentina in 1986 to investigate what appeared to be an international criminal enterprise, he very quickly focused in on an aspect of the case that I believe we’ve misunderstood all these years. Within his first month, Jeffries identified a shadowy suspect, someone he believed could be the central person of interest in charge of this entire operation. All he had, at first, was a name he mentioned that same day in your office:
I know this because Cooper is also on record, on one of his tapes to Diane from this period, about the only part of this conversation that took place in your office that he could exactly recall. Apparently the first words out of Jeffries’s mouth were these: “I’m not going to talk about Judy; in fact, we’re not going to talk about Judy at all, we’re going to keep her out of it.” (Can you also confirm this for me, Chief?)
Someone named Judy. At least, that’s who Cooper and everyone else in the task force assumed he was talking about. Until I discovered something recently, carved into the wall of his former Buenos Aires hotel room, near the phone, beneath a layer of new wallpaper that was added in 1997. It appeared to be the same name, but the spelling was different:
Joudy.
Carved, not written, deeply and hurriedly, with what appears to have been a pocketknife. Next to the phone. As if he’d heard something on a call and had to carve it right there on the wall. Not with a pen or a pencil, but a knife. Why would someone do that? Because this information upset him? Because it affected him to such a degree that only a weapon could express the depth and intensity of whatever he was feeling at the time?
Joudy. So who was this person, and why would just a name have that kind of impact on Phillip Jeffries? We know that, previously, he’d thought the name of the shadowy figure he was pursuing was Judy. Now he apparently had new information. An extra vowel. A slightly altered pronunciation. But what else did this change—what more did this tell him?
I’ve done some research of my own.
Joudy, it turns out, is also the name of an ancient entity in Sumerian mythology. (This dates back to at least 3000 B.C.) The name was used to describe a species of wandering demon—also generically known as an utukku—that had “escaped from the underworld” and roamed freely throughout the earth, where they feasted on human flesh and, allegedly, ripped the souls from their victims, which provided even more meaningful nourishment. They particularly thrived while feeding—and I quote—“on human suffering.” These beings were said to appear in both male and female forms—“Joudy” indicated the female, and the male was known as “Ba’al”—and, while they were considered beyond dangerous individually, if a male and a female ever united while on the earth, the ancient texts claimed, their resulting “marriage” would create something far more perilous. As in: the end of the world as we know it. A few centuries later, Ba’al becomes better known, in both Christian and Islamic sources, as “Beelzebub,” a false god, or, as he’s known more generally and generically today, the devil.
Do I have your attention yet, Chief?
So what do we do with this information? How does it change the focus of what we’re looking at here, if at all? What concrete leads was Jeffries on to? Are these just the insane ramblings of a man who, as you well know, swam in a sea filled with extravagant and esoteric conspiracy theories, a sure sign that he’d lost not only his way but his mind? Or do we calmly sit with this information and see whether, and how, it fits into what we already know? In other words: Do our jobs.
There’s one additional piece here that’s crucial to consider before we proceed. Ray Monroe, the deep-cover informant who apparently was recruited by someone involved with our task force to work on the “missing Cooper” case, succeeded in making contact with “the Double.” Strong evidence suggests that
Monroe penetrated his inner circle, met with him, and worked with him in the weeks or months prior to the Double’s surfacing in Buckhorn, South Dakota. I’ve come across a vague reference that indicates that Monroe, two years before Buckhorn, began working this operation in Las Vegas, where we know the Double had established part of his empire, with Duncan Todd as his local principal operative. I believe this is where Monroe’s first contact with the target may have taken place.
In a partially garbled phone message to an agency cutout, Monroe claimed he was reporting directly to someone inside the Blue Rose Task Force, but he never specified who it was. (If it was you, Chief, I believe you would have told us, wouldn’t you?) After the Double succeeded in breaking into and out of that South Dakota prison—taking Monroe with him—we know that at some point before he died, Monroe made a phone call on a burner found at the location in Montana where we also found Monroe’s body. Based on data retrieved from that phone, it seems that Ray Monroe believed that he had originally been recruited by, and had all along been working for, … Phillip Jeffries.
Let me repeat that: Ray Monroe believed he had been recruited by and was working for Phillip Jeffries, a man the Bureau had not seen or heard from since he disappeared from your Philadelphia office in 1989.
I’ll take this a step further: I believe it’s not only possible, but likely, that the Double went to all that trouble to spring Ray Monroe because he had reason to believe that Monroe would tell him where he could find Phillip Jeffries. I also think it’s highly probable that after the Double killed Monroe in Montana, he went looking for Jeffries.
Let’s pause here long enough to ask ourselves: Why did the Double want to find Jeffries? What did he hope to learn from him? This is where my own scientifically trained mind starts to encounter some pretty hefty cognitive dissonance, but here goes:
By any measure, Jeffries’s behavior in your office, in 1989, was damned peculiar. He was shocked to learn what year it was. He said what he said about “Joudy.” He also supposedly pointed an accusatory finger at Cooper and, panicked and afraid, shouted something like: “Who do you think this is there?!” He then disappeared—although once again the appropriate esoteric term for something like this is “dis-apparate,” apparate being the Latin root for “apparition”—not just right in front of your eyes, but also on security tape. Shortly after 10:15 A.M. Almost exactly when Jeffries reappeared—according to eyewitnesses—back in his Buenos Aires hotel, before, not long afterwards, vanishing altogether.
Since this doesn’t make sense inside the lines of any rational logic I can support, let me suggest something batshit crazy: What if Jeffries, not unlike Major Briggs a few years later, had gained access to the same system of “portals,” holes in dimensional space that allowed him to disappear and reappear, in places far apart in geographical terms, more or less at will? I’ll take it one step further, Chief: What if these same portals also allowed him to come untethered from time? Wouldn’t that help explain why Briggs hadn’t aged a day in twenty-five years? Could it also explain how Ray Monroe believed that he was receiving instructions from Phillip Jeffries?
(And as long as we’re skating on the thin side of the ice here, what if this not only made it possible to go forward in time, but also backwards? Could that explain the shock and dismay Jeffries exhibited in your office when he learned what year it was?)
After Monroe died, our investigators found a matchbook in his pocket, for a roadside motel called The Dutchman’s Lodge, in rural western Montana. I personally visited the address on the matchbook and there’s nothing there: It’s an empty space on the side of an old two-lane state highway. I then went back and checked historical records for the area and learned that there was such a motel at that exact location dating back to the early 1930s. It was built, owned, and operated by a man named Horace “the Dutchman” Vandersant, and it was known not only as a “gateway to a sportsman’s paradise,” but as a mob- and gangster-friendly establishment—rumor has it John Dillinger once spent a week there while on the lam. The lodge was shut down not long after Vandersant died, in 1962, and was demolished in 1967. For what it’s worth—and it could, of course, have been a skillful contemporary reproduction—the matchbook in Monroe’s pocket appeared to be relatively new.
There’s currently a two-day gap in our knowledge of the Double’s movements between when he killed Monroe and when he showed up in Twin Peaks: Is it possible that, after killing Monroe, the Double went to this “Dutchman’s Lodge,” looking for Phillip Jeffries? (For what it’s worth, the lodge’s former location lay directly between Missoula and Twin Peaks.) What might the Double have learned there? Was it Jeffries who told him something about the coordinates he’d been given that then sent him on to Twin Peaks? Let me explain why I think this is possible.
If Jeffries is still out in the ether somewhere, in the same way that Briggs was, lost or hiding in some kind of neither-here-nor-there netherworld, could this experience be so assaultive and disorienting to the senses that one consequence is you’re never completely sure exactly where or when you are? If we view Jeffries’s behavior in your office in 1989 through this lens, his alarm at learning when he’s there becomes, perhaps, more understandable.
For argument’s sake, let’s assume that, after he killed Monroe and learned about The Dutchman’s, the Double and Jeffries had some sort of contact—outside of linear time—at this no-longer-existing rustic Montana lodge. Now let’s refocus on Jeffries’s alarm at seeing Cooper in 1989—“Who do you think this is there?!”—through this same bizarre lens and this question comes up for me: Did Jeffries think he was seeing not Special Agent Dale Cooper, but the Double?
(At this point, I feel the need to uncategorically state the following: Don’t hold me to any of this, Chief. I’m just putting it out there.)
Here’s where it all moves beyond weird, Chief. No sooner has the smoke cleared after that shootout in Sheriff Truman’s office, with the Double fading away, and something black and spectral floating out of its body and up through the ceiling—don’t even get me going right now on that oddball Cockney kid with the green glove—than the lights go out and you and Cooper, apparently, “apparate” to the basement of the Great Northern Hotel. After a brief exchange, Cooper vanishes in the dark down a long corridor that isn’t actually there, the lights come back on, and you’re left standing with the Horne brothers in a boiler room.
And, for the second time in the past twenty-five years, Special Agent Dale Cooper disappears from sight, sound, and the world as we think we know it.
By the time you get back to the sheriff’s station, Diane Evans, Cooper’s longtime former assistant (whose mind-altering disappearance-and-doppelganger journey calls for, wouldn’t you agree, an exhaustive investigation of its own at some point), who was seen by more than twenty witnesses emerging from a holding cell in the basement only minutes before everything hit the fan in Truman’s office, has also now, without anyone in that crowded room noticing—including yours truly—once again disappeared without a trace.
So when you jetted off back to Philadelphia later that day and left me to cover the aftermath of what went down in Twin Peaks—my first visit; charming place, as you’ve always told me, but to be honest, Chief, I’m a big-city girl and always will be—and to mop up, to quote Albert, this “gargantuan multidimensional clusterfuck,” I decided to nose around a bit.
This happened today, Chief, just a few hours ago. Up to the minute.
Earlier this morning, while perusing past editions of the Twin Peaks Post—outstanding small-town paper, conveniently preserved on microfiche—for more than the fun of it, I went back to look up the occasion of the first Cooper disappearance from Twin Peaks. Sure enough, the intrepid Post reporting staff, expertly trained by their late editor Douglas Milford, featured his sudden and unexplained departure on their front page, along with pained and puzzled quotes from Cooper’s pal Sheriff Harry Truman, about how strange and confusing the whole business was.
You know
what else I discovered, Chief, in that same article, a few sentences later? This:
“Agent Cooper had come to town a few months earlier, to aid in the investigation into the disappearance, still unsolved, of local teenage beauty queen, Laura Palmer.”
Let me repeat that phrase for you: “still unsolved.” No mention of “murder,” “wrapped in plastic,” or “father arrested for shocking crime eventually dies in police custody of self-inflicted wounds.”
It’s right there on the front page: Laura Palmer did not die. So, fairly certain I’ve not misplaced my own mind, I go back and check the corresponding police records. They tell me this: Laura Palmer disappeared from Twin Peaks without a trace—on the very same night when, in the world we thought we knew, it used to be said she’d died—but the police never found the girl or, if she had been killed elsewhere, her body or made a single arrest. In every subsequent mention in an edition of the Post, the case is still listed as an open and pending investigation.
And when I spoke to our good friends at the sheriff’s office about this, they all got a slightly dazed and confused expression on their faces when I brought it up, as if they were lost in a fog, having trouble recalling, unable to fully wrap their minds around something that happened so very long ago.
Until finally they said, each and every one of them, “Yeah, that sounds right. That’s how I remember it.”
I started to examine the public records on the rest of the Palmer family. Their daughter’s disappearance dominated the local news for weeks. The same set of suspects was identified and questioned—Jacques Renault, Leo Johnson, Bobby Briggs, James Hurley—as those who were known to have been among the last to see her. No useful information came from them, and no arrests were initially made. The next day, Ronette Pulaski—the girl who was abducted and nearly killed along with Laura, and who had apparently still been taken captive—escaped and ended up in the hospital after being found wandering along a railroad trestle, just like “before.” But she also testified that Laura had wandered off into the woods before she and Leo and Jacques entered the railroad car.