The Procession of Jean-Jean Dou Ballon

No one recalls precisely when Jean-Jean Dou Ballon first appeared in Ellezelles. The elders say it happened on a carnival night, a night that was colder than usual and where the moon hid behind the clouds. In the village, the masks and costumes were donned as every year, but this year something hung different in the air — a tension, as if the night itself were on guard.

From the darkness of the alley beside the old church came a figure. Tall, unnaturally tall, its body draped in rags and ribbons of no colour — grey, like seawater, like mist. But what struck all who saw it was the head: an enormous balloon, inflated to impossibility, gleaming like a death’s mask and fitted with two holes where eyes should be. Within those holes, something moved. Light, perhaps. Or something that resembled light.

And in that moment Jean-Jean began to sing — not with a mouth, for he had none — but from every part of his being at once. It was a song the people did not know, yet in it they heard their blood freeze. It was a song of masks that would not come off, of faces lost, of carnival folk who would not return home after the night. It was an invitation, and at the same time a warning.

That night, say those who still speak of it — especially the very old women of Ellezelles who thought in their youth that they had seen something — the village filled with costumed figures. But they were not as in previous years. They moved in synchrony, step for step, and they said nothing. They wore masks fashioned from a medley of materials: wood, cloth, fibres of something that may once have lived. Their movements were fluid, as though they waded through water, and their eyes — if they had eyes — were fixed upon Jean-Jean Dou Ballon, who walked before them.

The cortège stretched and lengthened, extending to the very walls of the village. Those who looked upon it could not discern where it began or where it ended. Men, women, children — but also other forms, indistinct, wavering between two shapes, as though they were half in this world and half in another. Some bore instruments: flutes without holes, drums without sound, brass-work of unknown metal.

Jean-Jean himself danced, twisted, his balloon-head swaying on a neck that was impossibly long. Sometimes the balloon grew larger, sometimes smaller, sometimes it seemed ready to burst with laughter no one heard. The procession moved through streets where the people had locked themselves behind closed doors, through alleys where the sun never shone even by day, past the graveyard where the gravestones whispered.

As morning came, the cortège did not fade slowly but vanished suddenly, like a candle snuffed out. The streets were empty. The village was silent. And in that silence the people realized something that sent shivers down their spines: some among them knew of folk who had not returned home that night.

Not many. But enough to keep the story alive. A young girl who had gone out with friends in the evening, a man who had attended the carnival, a child of seven or eight years — they had simply vanished. Their parents said they had gone with the cortège, had clung to it as though they had become part of the procession itself. Or perhaps, the elders whispered, they had always been part of the cortège, even before Jean-Jean Dou Ballon with his balloon-head had called them forth.

Since that night — and no one any longer knows how long ago it was, thirty years, a hundred years — Jean-Jean still appears on carnival nights, especially the darkest ones. Young people laugh at such stories, say they are old wives’ tales. But the elders take care. They count their children, keep them close. And on that one night each year when the cortège passes — for who cannot feel it, even if they do not believe, feels it as it passes, feels it as a chill, a displacement in the air, the sound of silent music — they whisper prayers and hold their breath, hoping that the procession will pass without taking what it seeks.