The Great God Pan

Setting

Victorian London

Main Characters

Clarke: The protagonist, embroiled in the effects of his friend’s experiment.
Dr Raymond: Clarke’s friend, a doctor intent on accessing the spiritual world.
Pan: Ancient Greco-Roman god of the wild and nature, depicted as a satyr: a man with the horns, legs and tail of a goat.  
Mary: Dr Raymond’s patient, on whom he performs his experiment.
Helen Vaughan: The antagonist, whom Clarke learns of years after the initial experiment.

Summary

Clarke bears witness to Dr Raymond’s experiment, which aims to open Mary’s mind so that she may experience the spiritual world, “seeing the great god Pan”. He performs minor brain surgery on Mary, who awakens awed and terrified but quickly becomes incapacitated.

Years later, Clarke hears of a beautiful but sinister young girl named Helen Vaughan. An orphan sent to live with family in a small Welsh town, Helen is at the centre of a series of mysteries. One day, a young boy stumbles across Helen playing with “a strange naked man”. The boy becomes hysterical and, after seeing a statue of a satyr’s head, is left with permanent intellectual disability. Helen leads her friend, Rachel, into the woods several times, and on one occasion Rachel returns home distraught, half-naked and rambling. An explanation is revealed to Clarke that causes him great revulsion, and shortly after, Rachel returns to the woods and vanishes.

Years later the story introduces two men: Villiers and Herbert. Herbert has become a vagrant since he last met Villiers, reporting to have been “corrupted body and soul” by his wife. After some investigation Villiers and Clarke discover that Helen was Herbert’s wife, and that another man died of “sheer, awful terror” after seeing something in Helen and Herbert’s home. Herbert is later found dead.

Helen disappears for some time before eventually returning to London under the name Mrs. Beaumont. Soon after her return, men in the city start committing suicide. The last person known to have been with each of them is Mrs. Beaumont, and it is implied they have slept with her. Villiers and Clarke learn of Mrs. Beamont’s true identity and confront her with a noose. They tell her she must kill herself, or they will expose her. Helen concedes, and her death reveals her transformation between human and beast, male and female, before dividing into a jelly-like substance and dying.

A letter from Dr. Raymond to Clarke reveals that Helen was the child of Mary, who died shortly after the birth. Raymond informs Clarke that Mary became pregnant after his experiment that caused her to see the god Pan, implying that Pan assaulted and impregnated Mary, and that he was Helen’s father.