One Hidden Village in France

By L. G. Merrick
Illustrated by Steve Morris

All summer they wandered Europe under their enormous backpacks, Pete and DeShawn, hostel to hostel. It was a party to celebrate the end of college, and a last hurrah before the start of careers. They got beer-drunk in Berlin, opium-denned in Amsterdam, sipped coffee eyes wide admiring the statuary of Vienna. After two weeks in Paris they decided they wanted a “more unique” time, more “opportunity,” so they committed to the advice of the well-worn American poem — but in their updated interpretation, this meant not only taking roads less traveled, it meant also deleting GPS and even maps altogether. One afternoon they left even the roads, and trespassed across fields, slept in a crumbling Medieval tower at the edge of a wood. The next sunrise, they followed a creek into the wood.

The intent was to get lost, and it worked. They followed the creek all day, deeper in among the trees than they had thought it possible to go in so small a country, and it was only in the last desperate minutes of the day that a village appeared.

• • •

The village was enclosed by forest and was dark. Its medieval buildings stood knitted so tightly together that the narrow street felt like a corridor, under looming eaves like a ceiling. All windows were small and shuttered. The village might have been abandoned. Pete and DeShawn advanced cautiously, their initial relief giving way to trepidation. 

“So dark,” Pete whispered. He was the talker, and handled unease by chatter. “No streetlamps. No neon. Not even a moped with a headlight.”

So it felt discordant when a girl appeared, about their age, hurrying toward them.

“Excusez-moi, mademoiselle!” 

This was Pete, of course.

She looked up, startled. She had been preoccupied with intense thoughts, and now they both saw that she was stunning. Her broad high cheeks, the firm triangle of her nose; the curves of her features sheeny with oil — and it was the birthmark under one eye that made her appearance wholly distinct. With cataclysmic suddenness Pete suffered a desire to know her, find out who she was behind that face. There was such character in it, he could hardly stand to look at her — Jesus but he just wanted to keep looking at her. Maybe they’d get a beer together, if his French was good enough—

“Mon ami et moi,” he said, “nous voudrais un hôtel pour la nuit. Y a-t-il—”

She shocked him by grabbing his wrist. With her other hand she reached into the leather messenger bag at her hip. Her eyes wide in panic.

DeShawn stepped forward. He had a calm demeanor that without a word often prompted others to reconsider their mayhem. It had preempted a few conflicts on the trip so far.

What she pulled from the bag, however, surprised him.

“Depechez-vous!” she said. She tugged Pete’s wrist, towing him back the way she had come. Hurry up!

Then she let go in order to sprint, and looked back to repeat her command. Hurry, hurry! The urgency on her face doubled as she cast a glance down a narrow westward alley, and sunlight touched her directly, the dimmest ember of it. She issued a new command, too rapidly for them to grasp, and then lifted what she had drawn from her bag up to her face.

It was a mask. 

She snapped the elastic string around the back of her head. The face on the mask was plain. Really, was only a gesture at a face: two expressionless eyeholes, a noncommittally flat slit between barely-there lips. Its nose was only as distinct as necessary to fit over a real nose. It was a mannequinlike physiognomy from hairline to chin, ear to ear, and it was the white of smooth plaster, of no color at all.

The girl ran all out. Silently they deciphered her command.

Run! Before the sunset! Follow me!

They did. What choice did they have? 

When the sun set, they noticed it, though they had no view of the horizon. The air around them switched, as distinctly as a filter tapped on a camera, from deep amber to turgid violet. 

“Ici!” yelled the girl, muffled by her mask.

She held open a thick wooden door on the left, and waved them toward it with swoops of her arm so big the gesture could have guided a jumbo jet to land in a fog.

• • •

The crowd of twenty souls in the stuffy, low-ceilinged ancient room looked up from their dinners and drinks and fell silent.

Pete gave a modest wave, a quiet “Bonjour.” DeShawn noted the distinct Gallic features, those prevalent in the more static villages; the noses that naturally appeared to have been broken once or twice; the intensity along the lips and brows that could melt into charm, if it so chose, though never could do so entirely. The masked girl closed the door. The fireplace crackled. 

Pete’s backpack bumped along the rafters as he stepped to the lacquered wood bar. DeShawn, an inch shorter, did not have this problem but slipped his pack off more quickly. Pete indicated two beers. He did not ask what kind they served. This was his idea of a gesture, to show he was relaxed, a potential friend, trusting and therefore trustworthy. 

Every villager in the room, the bartender and the groups seated at the small round tables, lifted masks from bags held close. Everyone slipped on a mask identical to the girl’s. 

The girl locked the door with a massive sliding bolt of black iron. DeShawn noticed the only window, which had been shuttered on the outside, was also shuttered on the inside. 

“Je n’avais pas de choix,” the girl said to the crowd. 

She moved to stand between Pete and DeShawn, as if presenting them. She sounded sorry or nervous, but with the mask to hide her facial expressions, neither of them felt sure which it was. They struggled to follow the case she pleaded to the crowd. 

The sun was visible when I met them. Something along those lines. To leave them would have been evil. 

When she finished, the room held a crowd of silent, impassive masks. Staring. Evaluating, perhaps — it was impossible to say. Pete was about to speak but she preempted this by exchanging some quieter words with the bartender — then turning afterward to Pete and DeShawn.

“Thierry” — she indicated the bartender — “he will accept you. Do as he tells you. Yes?” Her English was clear enough.

They nodded, and she bid the room adieu. Faintly a murmur answered her. She opened the door only enough to slip out, and afterward the man seated nearest it clunked the iron bolt back into place.

When she was gone, they felt as if their only ally had departed. They had never felt more like outsiders. Pete wanted to say, “The hell?” But he wanted worse than that to be at home in Europe. Where they did things differently. Sometimes very differently. So, casually, he turned to Thierry and asked, “Dîner?”

• • •

Hearty lentil soup, thick slabs of bread, tall glasses of hazy ale. Thierry’s mask regarded their occasional attempts at conversation, or his head tilted, at any rate, as if he inclined an ear.

Eventually he spoke. He said, “Use English. Your French is offensive.”

Pete winced. “I apologize.”

The bartender shrugged. “We expect too much. And we are not used to foreign accents in Neucachâme.” 

“Neucachâme — am I saying that right? I’m sure it’s a beautiful town,” Pete said. DeShawn braced for one of Pete’s stupid jokes, for the way Pete would get familiar instantly with total strangers. It sometimes led to trouble. But the blankness of the bartender’s mask backed Pete down, and he said only, “We’ll want to see it in the morning.”

“Its charms you will find limited.” Thierry shrugged again. 

“Oh come on. You like it enough to live here.”

DeShawn held his breath, worried the disagreement would not be taken in the friendly way it was meant.

But Thierry answered calmly. 

“I grew up here. All the people know me. That is a charm that I enjoy, which you will not.”

DeShawn cast a half-glance over his shoulder at those people who knew Thierry. He saw only masks. A few had turned theirs up onto their heads to finish eating, but those individuals were seated with their backs to him, so the only faces he could see were masked. He thought some had never relaxed their stares upon him and Pete the whole time. 

Pete blazed ahead with Thierry. He thought he was getting somewhere. “Ever live anywhere else?”

Thierry’s eyes flitted to the crowd. They could not read his hesitation. Maybe he wasn’t one to reveal personal facts. Didn’t want to be seen accommodating the outsiders. Didn’t have an interesting story.

“At your age,” he said eventually. “I was a waiter in Cannes. For three years. A life the same as my life here, in a restaurant. But not the same. Away from home, I did not feel like myself. I was not known. I did not feel like anyone. It is — warm? — to be known.”

“Your home is full of interesting people,” Pete said.

He meant it warmly — and as a hopeful attempt to get an explanation for the masks — and he gestured to the crowd. But that was the most sudden movement he’d made yet, and his voice boomed too loudly, and the combination caught one man off-guard. In the middle of the room, visible in profile, he had lifted his mask partway to sip his beer. At Pete’s gesture, he slammed his glass down messily, turning it over, sending beer across the table, all in the effort to yank his mask back into place, as if terrified of being seen — and nearly falling from his chair in his scrabble to turn away from Pete. A commotion rose across the room. 

Quickly Thierry drew an ale and rushed it to that table, mopped up.

“What the hell is going on,” DeShawn whispered.

“It’s amazing,” Pete said, raising his phone surreptitiously to snap a photo.

He did not succeed. A woman spotted the camera and yelled. Thierry spun and threw his balled-up wet rag. Pete flinched, the rag splashed against his shoulder, and half the people in the room leapt to their feet. Thierry restrained one and swept back toward the outsiders, urging calm.

When he got to them, he held out his hand, palm up.

“The photo,” he said. “Give it.”

“I didn’t take—”

“Show me.”

When Pete hesitated, Thierry put a hand to the chin of his own mask and, decisively, he pushed it up onto the top of his head. 

The move unveiled a rough face of thirty-five; self-reliant with a tired wariness, a longing to relax, a conviction no such thing was possible.

“Show me your photos.”

Pete, thrilled to see a face, showed him. DeShawn too. Thierry announced to the crowd there were no photos of the town at all. The crowd settled. Thierry resumed his spot behind the bar.

“I know we are photogenic. The problem is, you see, we don’t want strangers. So you will sleep here tonight as my guests, a rare exception, and in return, I ask two promises. First, do not let the world know we are interesting. No photos. No uploads. No telling stories. Give no one a reason to visit us. Promise this.”

They promised. He nodded at their promise with a finality that made them think he might say nothing else the rest of the night. They wondered about the second promise but after that nod, did not ask. Thierry didn’t speak again until the fireplace was near dead and people began to leave. 

They left in clusters, always masked. Each time, the place fell silent in anticipation, and the interior lamps were killed, plunging the room into darkness before the door opened. When the door closed, people switched the lamps back on, and the bolt was clunked, but the remaining crowd never resumed its former buzz, and not only because smaller, but as if ill over the idea that they had sent friends out there.

After the third such departure, Pete dared to ask, in a whisper, “Why turn the lights off when people leave?”

Thierry, rinsing glasses, half-answered.

“No glow may light the dark,” he said.

“It attracts moths, I guess?” 

DeShawn felt irked by this crack and Pete, to his credit, also regretted it as soon as he’d said it.

“Something like moths,” Thierry said.

Among the last group to leave was the man who had knocked over his beer. He was drunk now, and before the last lamp was turned off, he peeled away from his friends and leapt at Pete and DeShawn. He pawed at their exposed faces, yabbered through his mouth-slot. It was startling — they could barely react better than to kick him from their stools — but quickly his friends pulled him back. Thierry killed the last lamp, and the door opened on a night even darker than the room, and his friends dragged him out. Then the door slammed, and they heard Thierry bolt it.

The yabbering had made no sense, of course. It is the night without a face! Something like that.

 When the lights came back up, Thierry untied his apron.

“Now for the second promise to me,” he said.

“We’ve been wondering,” Pete said.

“You will stay in this room. You have bedrolls in those packs?”

“Yes.”

“Make your beds. Stay up, sleep, whatever you like. But you must not go outside. All the night long.”

Pete hesitated, curiosity piqued. 

“It must get dark,” he ventured. “I didn’t see any streetlights.”

“Exactement. Tonight no glow will touch the outside. Not even from an open window. You understand? It is the pure dark.” Again that little shrug, which seemed to suggest that what he said made sense in a way that could not survive explaining—but made sense nonetheless. A Gallic tic. Then he added, as if it occurred to him belatedly that American boys would need a practical reason, “We have repairs to the streets. Open ditches. You will break a foot. End of the backpack vacation then, eh? So. The door stays closed until sunrise. Do you promise?”

They promised.

Then Thierry opened a narrow door of crooked planks on iron hinges that they had until that instant assumed to be a supply closet. It revealed a narrow staircase up. He closed it behind him, and they heard him bolt it before ascending. They heard him converse with a woman, and it seemed he must live above the restaurant with a wife.  

They were surprised when he came back and opened the door for one more minute.

“Tell me your names,” he said.

“Pete.”

“DeShawn.”

“Your full names.”

They told him. No; he wanted their middle names too. Full. They told him.

“I will ask you again in the morning,” he said.

• • •

After he left, they turned a couple chairs to face the cooling fireplace, treated themselves to more beer from the tap, and tried to understand the day’s weirdness. 

“The ‘night without a face’ — meaning the masks, right? Hiding everyone’s face?”

“The drunk kid said we were bad luck.”

“No, we have bad luck. They closed the road in, he said. By luck we got here anyway.”

“They close it monthly. I caught that part.”

They murmured, increasingly tired.

“We’re squirreling away so many memories,” DeShawn said. “The next forty years, trapped behind a desk, I’ll be able to get right here in my head.”

“It’s more than that,” Pete said. He felt philosophical. “We’re not those two guys who graduated. Which was our goal, even if we didn’t realize it. To come back different. Everything here has changed us.” He shrugged. That shrug, that tic, they’d been seeing it for days and Thierry had it, and Pete slipped it, just then, into his personal repertoire. DeShawn wondered how many months or years it might last. “And change is good,” Pete added.

DeShawn wondered whether Pete had always been unhappy. But he did not pursue the thought because alongside it, his exhausted brain made an unrelated connection that prodded him upright, wide awake — at least fleetingly.

“The night without a face!” He snapped his fingers. “Monthly road closures. Get it?”

Pete rose partway from his philosophical stupor. “What?”

“No face means no moon.” He confirmed it on his phone. “Yes! Tonight is the new moon. Pure dark, Thierry said.”

Pete practically leapt from his chair. He forgot to stay hushed.

“A local festival!” he said. “Once a month! They wear masks, they keep the streets dark. My gosh, we’ve stumbled on some secret holiday? Like — do any other towns honor the new moon this way?”

“Thierry said his town is unique.”

“Oh, fantastic. And we got to see it. Well — almost.”

Pete moved quickly. He unbolted the door. DeShawn stood.

“Hey,” he said. “We promised.”

“We promised before we knew. I just want a peek.”

DeShawn hissed in protest. “Stop.”

“Maybe there’s something amazing,” Pete said, voice hushed with a sense of wonder, giddy with the potential. “A parade. A silent, dark parade. . .”

Then DeShawn saw a way to stop him. 

“Okay. Fine,” he said, “but only if we find masks to wear.”

Pete saw the utility instantly. If they were spotted but their faces were hidden, they could deny everything in the morning. Within minutes he turned up a couple of masks in a cupboard. DeShawn was sorry his condition had been met, but fair was fair, he was in. He killed the lamp.

Pete opened the slowly. DeShawn’s heart thundered with the guilt of breaking a promise. Pete’s raced with the thrill of becoming more aware of the world, more like the people of this town, more unique. They stepped out, masked, into the night.

It greeted them with clammy air, coated their necks in a damp chill even before DeShawn shut the door behind them.

The empty street ran a short way in either direction before turning from view. The other buildings were almost all windowless on the ground floor, shuttered on the second and third stories. There were no lights except the narrow rent of starry sky overhead, which looked no more real than a projection on a ceiling. Such was their sense of the village at midnight, a maze of close walls, black eaves, chilly air sounding only with the buzz of nearby forest crickets. The village had a claustrophobia to it, as if devised to obstruct perspective. Why lay a street so crooked? Why not a view down to the creek?

Pete flipped his mask onto the top of his head and breathed deep.

“Well,” he said, “no parade.”

“Shh.”

“Relax, dude. Everyone’s asleep.”

“Maybe,” DeShawn said. “Put your mask back on. That was the deal.”

“I will if I hear someone coming.”

When someone did approach, though, he heard nothing. 

It was perhaps more DeShawn’s fault. DeShawn saw the approach, yet didn’t believe it. He took it for a blur in his vision, the sleep he needed rapidly crowding back in on him. It was, after all, only the outline of a person. Or less than that, because the proportions were wrong. It would have been a person so thin as to barely exist. A smudged colorless figure who peered around a corner — and then noticed him — or Pete, actually; it definitely fixed on Pete — and then came creeping across the open cobblestones.

Still, for the next whole second, DeShawn considered it a dream. How else to explain the soundlessness. The thinness. A person wearing a bodystocking? A spindly, sexless figure, short, loping toward Pete with long swings of its arms — how could it be real? The face, truly, the face proved it was not. 

At the same time, it was the face that jolted DeShawn wide awake.

“Look!” 

He grabbed Pete’s arm.

“Ow. What — Oh.”

One last bound and the figure would be upon them. It reached for Pete, arms outstretched and — and wobbling, as if hardly more firm than spaghetti.

“Inside!” DeShawn said. 

He turned to the door, pushed through.

“Go!” Pete cried, right behind him.

They were in. Slammed the door. Slapped the bolt. DeShawn, panting, cursing, dove for the nearest lamp, for where he remembered it being, knocked it over in the pitch, caught it by its shade — finally fumbled it into life. He spun when it was lit to see Pete trembling. Swaying. Pale.

“What the hell,” DeShawn said. “What the hell!”

Pete went to the door and pressed his palms to it, as if expecting an attempt to batter it down. As if needing to lean on something.

DeShawn said, “That thing had no face.” 

It had a head too large for its slight body, a hairless oblong head. It had seen them through no eyes. There had been no mouth, no nose, no bump or indent in their place. Not a single rudiment needed to live. 

DeShawn removed the mask he was wearing and looked at it, cast it away.

“No face,” he repeated. “Right?”

Pete’s breath sounded controlled now. He stepped back, lowered his hands to his sides. Kept his eyes on the door.

“I did not get a good look. But we have shut it out. We are safe.”

He said it so coolly that DeShawn laughed.

“I guess so!” DeShawn said. “Now what? Just go to sleep?”

Pete replied, “Yes. Sleep.”

Neither of them moved. Nothing banged on the door. 

In a minute, DeShawn began to question the whole incident. Surely he had misapprehended. He had not seen a faceless creature.

When he lay down after some pacing, conscious thought shut off almost immediately, as if to escape its failure to comprehend. At the same time he was aware that Pete remained upright, staring wide-eyed into the dead fireplace. In the day’s very last second, DeShawn realized — and his mind was not orderly when this realization intruded; it was giving itself to the twist and overlap of dream — that when he turned to the door, he turned away from Pete. For two full seconds, he had let Pete and the faceless thing together out of his sight.

Don’t fall asleep, he told himself. That’s not Pete over there. 

But the thought came too late, part of a dream.

• • •

DeShawn awoke shortly after dawn to see Pete had opened the door and was standing in the gray light, backpack on, anxious to leave.

“Hold up,” DeShawn said. “I’ll write Thierry a note saying we didn’t want to trouble him for breakfast.”

“Quickly,” Pete said. “Before he finds us.”

A thin mist drifted over the street. There were no other people in sight. Pete made them hustle. When they reached the end of the buildings, the cobbles ended too. It was an inhospitable dirt road from there, into the woods. 

They didn’t talk much along it.

When the mist was gone and the sun had begun to signal this might become a hot day, they sat on a log to eat power bars. DeShawn studied his old friend. 

Pete noticed.

“You’re staring at me,” he said.

“Sorry. You’re quiet, that’s all. It’s not like you.”

“Who is it like?”

“No one, I guess.”

“That’s right. No one. Let’s go.”

They resumed. DeShawn kept his eyes ahead. He did not want to look at Pete. There was nothing wrong. He couldn’t look. He thought of Thierry saying. I’ll ask your full names again in the morning. He supposed now that he could see the reason behind it. He wanted to ask, and he did not want to.

The only sounds were their footfalls, the clink and shuffle of their backpacks.

DeShawn hoped for a flat stretch of road. When at last he got one, he confirmed, with repeated brief glances at Pete beside him — confirmed over and over, to be absolutely sure — that Pete was an inch shorter than him.

“Why are you looking at me?” Pete asked.

“Jeez. I’m just looking around,” DeShawn said.

He did not mention that yesterday, and for years before yesterday, Pete had been an inch taller than him. 

“Listen,” he said after a while. “I have a strange question. . .”

“What question?” 

Pete’s head swiveled to DeShawn as they walked. DeShawn glanced over to encounter a stare so wide, so unblinking, that he thought for a moment, absurdly, that Pete did not have eyelids, had eyes no more real than plastic doll’s eyes. 

It was the lifeless stare, DeShawn felt, that precedes a murder.

“Forget it.”

“No.”

“Well — alright, you probably remember, Thierry planned to ask us our full names this morning. Which is dumb. Right? I’m DeShawn Robeson Parker, and obviously you know who you are.”

“That is strange,” Pete said.

A darkness flashed behind his eyes, like a shadow crossing inside him. DeShawn went cold. Then looked away and laughed — not too nervously, he hoped.

“Hey man,” DeShawn said. “You’re my good friend. We look out for each other.” He thought carefully as they walked. He said, “My good friend Peter Alan Orr.”

It was two steps further down the road before Pete laughed as well, pleased and hollow.

“Great,” Pete said. “I feel great. I feel like today is my birthday.”

Half a mile later, the dirt road became a paved road, and each with a tremendous sense of relief, the two young men at last left behind the darkling forest, and headed into the wide world of opportunity.

The end