Pan

Pan is the main villain of The Great God novella. He is the the Great God of the Abyss or Deep and the father of Helen Vaughan. The Great God Pan is the timeless, eternal force of the Universe who presided over the Deep Abyss of consciousness.

Description
Dr. Raymond perform a strange experiment he calls "seeing the great god Pan" while Clarke witness. The ultimate goal of the doctor is to open the mind of man so that he may experience the spiritual world, an experience he calls "seeing the great god Pan", which involves minor brain surgery, on a young woman named Mary. She awakens from the operation awed and terrified but quickly becomes "a hopeless idiot".

Years later, Clarke learns of a beautiful, sinister girl named Helen Vaughan, who is believed to be the cause of a series of mysterious happenings in her own town. She spends much of her time in the woods near her house, where a young boy stumbles across her talking to a strange man one day; the boy becomes hysterical and later, after seeing a Roman statue of a satyr's head, becomes permanently feeble-minded. Helen also befriends a neighbour girl, Rachel, whom she leads several times into the woods. On one occasion Rachel returns home distraught; afterward, she returns to the woods and disappears forever.

Years later, Villiers happens across his old friend Herbert, who has become a vagrant since they last met. When asked how he has fallen so low, Herbert replies that he has been "corrupted body and soul" by his wife, who is later revealed to be Helen. Soon after, Herbert is found dead.

Helen disappears for some time, supposedly taking part in disturbing orgies somewhere in the Americas. She eventually returns to London under the pseudonym Mrs. Beaumont, her appearance followed by a series of suicides. Villiers and Clarke, each learning of Mrs. Beaumont's true identity, band together and confront Helen in her house. They persuade her to hang herself, and Helen has a very abnormal death, transforming between human and beast before finally dying. Helen is finally revealed to be the child of Mary and the great god Pan, who was let in when Dr. Raymond opened her mind up to him.