I am using the following mod-rewrite in my .htaccess file:

RewriteRule ^$ pages/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ pages/$1 [L]

The intention is to hide the subdirectory called /pages/ from displaying in the URL.

So this: http://mysite.com/pages/home.html

Will look like this: http://mysite.com/home.html

It works but there are some unintended consequences.

As a direct result of the .htaccess code I posted above, my 404 routing is no longer working at all. Anything that should trigger a 404 error page is instead generating a 500 Server Error.

How to fix?