He half expected to see the walls
of the laboratory melt and disappear, and to awake in London,
shuddering at his own sleeping fancies. But at last the door opened,
and the doctor returned, and behind him came a girl of about seventeen,
dressed all in white. She was so beautiful that Clarke did not wonder
at what the doctor had written to him. She was blushing now over face
and neck and arms, but Raymond seemed unmoved. “Mary,” he said, “the time has come. You are quite free. Are you
willing to trust yourself to me entirely?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Do you hear that, Clarke? You are my witness. Here is the chair, Mary. It is quite easy. Just sit in it and lean back. Are you ready?”

“Yes, dear, quite ready. Give me a kiss before you begin.”

The doctor stooped and kissed her mouth, kindly enough. “Now shut your
eyes,” he said. The girl closed her eyelids, as if she were tired, and
longed for sleep, and Raymond placed the green phial to her nostrils. Her face grew white, whiter than her dress; she struggled faintly, and
then with the feeling of submission strong within her, crossed her arms
upon her breast as a little child about to say her prayers. The bright
light of the lamp fell full upon her, and Clarke watched changes
fleeting over her face as the changes of the hills when the summer
clouds float across the sun. And then she lay all white and still, and
the doctor turned up one of her eyelids. She was quite unconscious. Raymond pressed hard on one of the levers and the chair instantly sank
back. Clarke saw him cutting away a circle, like a tonsure, from her
hair, and the lamp was moved nearer. Raymond took a small glittering
instrument from a little case, and Clarke turned away shudderingly. When he looked again the doctor was binding up the wound he had made. “She will awake in five minutes.” Raymond was still perfectly cool. “There is nothing more to be done; we can only wait.”

The minutes passed slowly; they could hear a slow, heavy, ticking. There was an old clock in the passage. Clarke felt sick and faint; his
knees shook beneath him, he could hardly stand. Suddenly, as they watched, they heard a long-drawn sigh, and suddenly
did the colour that had vanished return to the girl’s cheeks, and
suddenly her eyes opened. Clarke quailed before them. They shone with
an awful light, looking far away, and a great wonder fell upon her
face, and her hands stretched out as if to touch what was invisible;
but in an instant the wonder faded, and gave place to the most awful
terror. The muscles of her face were hideously convulsed, she shook
from head to foot; the soul seemed struggling and shuddering within the
house of flesh. It was a horrible sight, and Clarke rushed forward, as
she fell shrieking to the floor. Three days later Raymond took Clarke to Mary’s bedside. She was lying
wide-awake, rolling her head from side to side, and grinning vacantly. “Yes,” said the doctor, still quite cool, “it is a great pity; she is a
hopeless idiot. However, it could not be helped; and, after all, she
has seen the Great God Pan.”




II
MR. CLARKE’S MEMOIRS


Mr. Clarke, the gentleman chosen by Dr. Raymond to witness the strange
experiment of the god Pan, was a person in whose character caution and
curiosity were oddly mingled; in his sober moments he thought of the
unusual and eccentric with undisguised aversion, and yet, deep in his
heart, there was a wide-eyed inquisitiveness with respect to all the
more recondite and esoteric elements in the nature of men. The latter
tendency had prevailed when he accepted Raymond’s invitation, for
though his considered judgment had always repudiated the doctor’s
theories as the wildest nonsense, yet he secretly hugged a belief in
fantasy, and would have rejoiced to see that belief confirmed. The
horrors that he witnessed in the dreary laboratory were to a certain
extent salutary; he was conscious of being involved in an affair not
altogether reputable, and for many years afterwards he clung bravely to
the commonplace, and rejected all occasions of occult investigation. Indeed, on some homeopathic principle, he for some time attended the
seances of distinguished mediums, hoping that the clumsy tricks of
these gentlemen would make him altogether disgusted with mysticism of
every kind, but the remedy, though caustic, was not efficacious. Clarke
knew that he still pined for the unseen, and little by little, the old
passion began to reassert itself, as the face of Mary, shuddering and
convulsed with an unknown terror, faded slowly from his memory. Occupied all day in pursuits both serious and lucrative, the temptation
to relax in the evening was too great, especially in the winter months,
when the fire cast a warm glow over his snug bachelor apartment, and a
bottle of some choice claret stood ready by his elbow. His dinner
digested, he would make a brief pretence of reading the evening paper,
but the mere catalogue of news soon palled upon him, and Clarke would
find himself casting glances of warm desire in the direction of an old
Japanese bureau, which stood at a pleasant distance from the hearth. Like a boy before a jam-closet, for a few minutes he would hover
indecisive, but lust always prevailed, and Clarke ended by drawing up
his chair, lighting a candle, and sitting down before the bureau. Its
pigeon-holes and drawers teemed with documents on the most morbid
subjects, and in the well reposed a large manuscript volume, in which
he had painfully entered the gems of his collection. Clarke had a fine
contempt for published literature; the most ghostly story ceased to
interest him if it happened to be printed; his sole pleasure was in the
reading, compiling, and rearranging what he called his “Memoirs to
prove the Existence of the Devil,” and engaged in this pursuit the
evening seemed to fly and the night appeared too short. On one particular evening, an ugly December night, black with fog, and
raw with frost, Clarke hurried over his dinner, and scarcely deigned to
observe his customary ritual of taking up the paper and laying it down
again. He paced two or three times up and down the room, and opened the
bureau, stood still a moment, and sat down. He leant back, absorbed in
one of those dreams to which he was subject, and at length drew out his
book, and opened it at the last entry. There were three or four pages
densely covered with Clarke’s round, set penmanship, and at the
beginning he had written in a somewhat larger hand:

Singular Narrative told me by my Friend, Dr. Phillips. He assures me
that all the facts related therein are strictly and wholly True, but
refuses to give either the Surnames of the Persons Concerned, or the
Place where these Extraordinary Events occurred. Mr. Clarke began to read over the account for the tenth time, glancing
now and then at the pencil notes he had made when it was told him by
his friend.