Absorbed as he was by his new-found brat-minding duties, Mirko had nearly forgotten about the party. He was new to the community, and he had joined from a culture that didn’t mark the new year. For the residents of the Impasse du Passage, a blind alley tucked away in the warren of narrow streets surrounding the Grand-Place, the annual New Year celebrations were a sacred tradition. No one had realised that this fact might need to be pointed out to incomers.
By the time he entered the old warehouse that formed the end of the alley, everyone had given up on him. On the ground floor, the event was in full swing. It had been scheduled a few days into the new year so that all could attend: the weres had only just emerged from their full-moon units in the loft after the monthly three-night lock-in.
The tables had been aligned along the sides to clear a dance floor, the walls were festooned with garlands and fat baubles, and vast quantities of food had been set out on plates and trays. Amidst the chaos, Adelphine was filling glasses of various sizes with an alarming green brew from a cauldron. A huge Christmas tree perched on the side of the stage, where the lutins were reaching the grand finale of the annual re-enactment of the community’s origin story.
Many different takes on this saga had been produced over the centuries, all ending with the bit where Josse and Adelphine realise that the Manneken incident has rendered them immortal. Josse clocks that he has been hit by the immortality arm of the deflected spell, and Adelphine suspects that her curse triggered the Rule of Three: what she sent out into the world returned to her threefold.
Sadly, Mirko had missed the scenes recounting the door-dousing drama and Josse’s decision to hide Adelphine from the neighbour’s wrath. The lutins take great joy in showing how he whisked her away to a disused cellar located under the main market square and how she struggled to recover from the energy depletion that nearly killed her. Well, it would have killed her, had she been able to die. Turns out that making immortals really takes it out of you.
Prancing about in their tapered caps, the lutins also seized the chance to explore how Josse subsequently brought many more lost supernaturals into the fold. Every year they thought up new and increasingly absurd examples of possible waifs and strays that might fit right in. I mean, a sentient fart that lives on waffle stand fumes? Who even comes up with ideas like that?
But it is true that, over the years, the community grew. It lived underground until Josse, who goes by the name Jos these days, acquired a first building in a small impasse near the medieval town hall. As opportunities arose, he bought up more buildings until he owned the entire impasse. It’s not large enough to house them all, but there are those who prefer to stay away from daylight and humans anyway.
The timeline covered in the plays typically doesn’t extend to the modern era, where the community also came to welcome a few stranded extraterrestrials and the odd artificial life form. Minuit the AI cat doesn’t care.
Mirko does know that the community’s hidden realm extends well beyond the actual impasse, across several kilometres of tunnels and cellars and hidden galleries under the heart of the historic city centre and all the way to the Senne. There’s a hidden entrance to this underworld in one of the buildings. A passage. Hence the name.
As the lutins take their final bow to thundering applause, Jos prepares to address the community. He still doesn’t look a day over sixty – and a younger sixty than back in the day, thanks to the power of moisturiser and modern dentistry. His wild grey hair is twisted back in the usual tangle, pinned up today by a freebie biro from a builders’ merchant.
He says pretty much the same thing every year, with a few variations for key events that affected the community or the world beyond. He will conclude with a toast to the community, at which point attendees will finally get to take a swig of the glasses of Brillevert they have been carrying around for at least half an hour.
They will lick their lips and declare that this is Adelphine’s best batch yet. It’s their way of showing Adelphine, who’ll have been rolling her eyes and sucking her teeth over the one-sided presentation of the incident, that they don’t hold her past kid-cursing tendencies against her.
She will pretend that she doesn’t care one way or another, but of course she hates having the whole fiasco re-enacted year on year without fail. One day, she will take charge of the play and produce it from her perspective. You just wait and see.
Eventually, Josse will shout out the long-expected words “Happy New Year to you all. And now, let’s get this party started!” And before he does, he will lead the community in its mantra: “Pour vivre heureux,” he will say, and the entire assembly, at the top of their lungs, will bellow the response: “Vivons cachés!”
* Of course, multiples of immortality are academic. But Adelphine assumes that she is likely three times as eternal as Josse. Not that anyone knows for sure, or that it matters. That said, with hindsight, she feels very fortunate that her hex’s part about remaining “…precisely in this position” hit an inanimate object.