Dr. Raymond's ultimate goal is to devise a way to open the mind of man so that he may experience all the world has to offer. He calls this, "seeing the great god Pan." After much study of the human mind he devises an experiment which involves minor brain surgery. He performs this experiment on a young woman named Mary, but when she awakes she is terrified and mentally crippled. Years later, the beautiful but sinister-looking Helen Vaughan is reported to have caused a series of mysterious happenings in a small nameless town. She spends all her days in the woods, scares a boy so much he is hospitalized, and leads to the rape of her best friend Rachel. Helen then moves to the London social scene and marries a man named Herbert. Years later Herbert is found by his former friend Villiers to be a beggar and vagrant. When asked how he has fallen so low, Herbert replies that he has been "corrupted body and soul" by his wife. Helen disappears for some time, supposedly taking part in disturbing orgies somewhere in the Americas. When she returns as Mrs. Beaumont she is followed by a series of suicides. Villiers discovers that she is in fact Helen and goes to confront her. He persuades her to hang herself and she has a very abnormal death, transforming between human and beast before finally dying. Ultimately, it is discovered that Helen is the child of Mary and Pan, who was let in when Raymond opened her mind up to him.
About the Author: Arthur Machen (3 March 1863 - 15 December 1947) was a Welsh author and mystic of the 1890s and early 20th century. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His novella The Great God Pan (1890; 1894) has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror (Stephen King has called it "Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language"). He is also well known for his leading role in creating the legend of the Angels of Mons. Machen was born Arthur Llewelyn Jones in Caerleon, Monmouthshire, though he usually referred to the county by its Welsh name, Gwent. The house of his birth, opposite the Olde Bull Inn in The Square at Caerleon, is adjacent to the Priory Hotel and is today marked with a commemorative blue plaque. The beautiful landscape of Monmouthshire, with its associations of Celtic, Roman, and medieval history, made a powerful impression on him, and his love of it is at the heart of many of his works. Around 1890 Machen began to publish in literary magazines, writing stories influenced by the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, some of which used gothic or fantastic themes. This led to his first major success, The Great God Pan. It was published in 1894 by John Lane in the noted Keynotes Series, which was part of the growing aesthetic movement of the time. Machen's story was widely denounced for its sexual and horrific content and subsequently sold well, going into a second edition. Lovecraft pays tribute to the influence by directly incorporating some of Machen's creations and references, such as Nodens and Aklo, into his Cthulhu Mythos and using similar plot lines, most notably seen by a comparison of "The Dunwich Horror" to The Great God Pan and of "The Whisperer in Darkness" to "The Novel of the Black Seal". Other Lovecraft tales with a debt or reference to Machen include "The Call of Cthulhu", "The Festival", "Cool Air", "The Descendant", and "The Colour Out of Space"