Великий бог Пан

Arthur MACHEN

THE GREAT  
GOD PAN

HORROR STORY

УДК  372.8 
ББК  81.2 Англ-93 
 
М45

ISBN 978-5-9925-1687-6

Мейчен, Артур.

М45       Великий бог Пан / А. Мейчен : книга для чтения 

на английском языке. — Санкт-Петербург : КАРО, 
2024. — 352 с. — (Horror Story).

ISBN 978-5-9925-1687-6.

Артур Мейчен — признанный классик жанра хор рор. 
Перед вами знаковая проза Мейчена: таинственные и за
путанные истории с неочевидным фи налом. Сюжеты держат 
читателя в постоянном сладостном на пряжении. Оккультные тайны, странные эксперименты с человеческой природой, древние языческие силы, зловещие убийства и страшные видения... Мистика и саспенс проникли в литературу 
ХХ века через Артура Мейчена и остались в мировой  попкультуре навсег да. 

Неадаптированные тексты печатаются на языке ориги
нала без сокращений.

УДК 372.8

ББК 81.2 Англ-93

© КАРО, 2024
Все права защищены

    
The Great God Pan

I. The Experiment

'I am glad you came, Clarke; very glad indeed. 

I was not sure you could spare the time.'

'I was able to make arrangements for a few days; 

things are not very lively just now. But have you no 
misgivings, Raymond? Is it absolutely safe?'

The two men were slowly pacing the terrace in 

front of Dr. Raymond’s house. The sun still hung 
above the western mountain line, but it shone with 
a dull red glow that cast no shadows, and all the 
air was quiet; a sweet breath came from the great 
wood on the hillside above, and with it, at intervals, 
the soft murmuring call of the wild doves. Below, 
in the long lovely valley, the river wound in and out 
between the lonely hills, and, as the sun hovered 
and vanished into the west, a faint mist, pure white, 
began to rise from the hills. Dr. Raymond turned 
sharply to his friend.

'Safe? Of course it is. In itself the operation is a 

perfectly simple one; any surgeon could do it.'

'And there is no danger at any other stage?'

'None; absolutely no physical danger whatsoever, 

I give you my word. You are always timid, Clarke, always; but you know my history. I have devoted myself 
to transcendental medicine for the last twenty years. 
I have heard myself called quack and charlatan and 
impostor, but all the while I knew I was on the right 
path. Five years ago I reached the goal, and since then 
every day has been a preparation for what we shall 
do tonight.'

'I should like to believe it is all true.' Clarke knit 

his brows, and looked doubtfully at Dr. Raymond. 'Are 
you perfectly sure, Raymond, that your theory is not 
a phantasmagoria—a splendid vision, certainly, but 
a mere vision after all?'

Dr. Raymond stopped in his walk and turned 

sharply. He was a middle-aged man, gaunt and thin, of 
a pale yellow complexion, but as he answered Clarke 
and faced him, there was a flush on his cheek.

'Look about you, Clarke. You see the mountain, 

and hill following after hill, as wave on wave, you see 
the woods and orchard, the fields of ripe corn, and 
the meadows reaching to the reed-beds by the river. 
You see me standing here beside you, and hear my 
voice; but I tell you that all these things—yes, from 
that star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid 
ground beneath our feet—I say that all these are but 
dreams and shadows; the shadows that hide the real 
world from our eyes. There is a real world, but it is 

beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these 
‘chases in Arras, dreams in a career,’ beyond them all 
as beyond a veil. I do not know whether any human 
being has ever lifted that veil; but I do know, Clarke, 
that you and I shall see it lifted this very night from 
before another’s eyes. You may think this all strange 
nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the 
ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called 
it seeing the god Pan.'

Clarke shivered; the white mist gathering over the 

river was chilly.

'It is wonderful indeed,' he said. 'We are standing 

on the brink of a strange world, Raymond, if what you 
say is true. I suppose the knife is absolutely necessary?'

'Yes; a slight lesion in the grey matter, that is all; 

a trifling rearrangement of certain cells, a microscopical alteration that would escape the attention 
of ninety-nine brain specialists out of a hundred. I 
don’t want to bother you with ‘shop,’ Clarke; I might 
give you a mass of technical detail which would 
sound very imposing, and would leave you as enlightened as you are now. But I suppose you have 
read, casually, in out-of-the-way corners of your paper, that immense strides have been made recently 
in the physiology of the brain. I saw a paragraph the 
other day about Digby’s theory, and Browne Faber’s 
discoveries. Theories and discoveries! Where they 

are standing now, I stood fifteen years ago, and I 
need not tell you that I have not been standing still 
for the last fifteen years. It will be enough if I say 
that five years ago I made the discovery that I alluded to when I said that ten years ago I reached 
the goal. After years of labour, after years of toiling 
and groping in the dark, after days and nights of disappointments and sometimes of despair, in which I 
used now and then to tremble and grow cold with 
the thought that perhaps there were others seeking 
for what I sought, at last, after so long, a pang of sudden joy thrilled my soul, and I knew the long journey 
was at an end. By what seemed then and still seems 
a chance, the suggestion of a moment’s idle thought 
followed up upon familiar lines and paths that I had 
tracked a hundred times already, the great truth 
burst upon me, and I saw, mapped out in lines of 
sight, a whole world, a sphere unknown; continents 
and islands, and great oceans in which no ship has 
sailed (to my belief) since a Man first lifted up his 
eyes and beheld the sun, and the stars of heaven, and 
the quiet earth beneath. You will think this all highflown language, Clarke, but it is hard to be literal. 
And yet; I do not know whether what I am hinting 
at cannot be set forth in plain and lonely terms. For 
instance, this world of ours is pretty well girded now 
with the telegraph wires and cables; thought, with 
something less than the speed of thought, flashes 

from sunrise to sunset, from north to south, across 
the floods and the desert places. Suppose that an 
electrician of today were suddenly to perceive that 
he and his friends have merely been playing with 
pebbles and mistaking them for the foundations of 
the world; suppose that such a man saw uttermost 
space lie open before the current, and words of men 
flash forth to the sun and beyond the sun into the 
systems beyond, and the voice of articulate-speaking 
men echo in the waste void that bounds our thought. 
As analogies go, that is a pretty good analogy of what 
I have done; you can understand now a little of what 
I felt as I stood here one evening; it was a summer 
evening, and the valley looked much as it does now; 
I stood here, and saw before me the unutterable, the 
unthinkable gulf that yawns profound between two 
worlds, the world of matter and the world of spirit; I 
saw the great empty deep stretch dim before me, and 
in that instant a bridge of light leapt from the earth 
to the unknown shore, and the abyss was spanned. 
You may look in Browne Faber’s book, if you like, and 
you will find that to the present day men of science 
are unable to account for the presence, or to specify 
the functions of a certain group of nerve-cells in the 
brain. That group is, as it were, land to let, a mere 
waste place for fanciful theories. I am not in the position of Browne Faber and the specialists, I am perfectly instructed as to the possible functions of those 

nerve-centers in the scheme of things. With a touch 
I can bring them into play, with a touch, I say, I can 
set free the current, with a touch I can complete the 
communication between this world of sense and—
we shall be able to finish the sentence later on. Yes, 
the knife is necessary; but think what that knife will 
effect. It will level utterly the solid wall of sense, and 
probably, for the first time since man was made, a 
spirit will gaze on a spirit-world. Clarke, Mary will 
see the god Pan!'

'But you remember what you wrote to me? I 

thought it would be requisite that she—'

He whispered the rest into the doctor’s ear.
'Not at all, not at all. That is nonsense. I assure 

you. Indeed, it is better as it is; I am quite certain of 
that.'

'Consider the matter well, Raymond. It’s a great 

responsibility. Something might go wrong; you would 
be a miserable man for the rest of your days.'

'No, I think not, even if the worst happened. As 

you know, I rescued Mary from the gutter, and from almost certain starvation, when she was a child; I think 
her life is mine, to use as I see fit. Come, it’s getting 
late; we had better go in.'

Dr. Raymond led the way into the house, through 

the hall, and down a long dark passage. He took a 
key from his pocket and opened a heavy door, and 
motioned Clarke into his laboratory. It had once been 

a billiard-room, and was lighted by a glass dome in 
the centre of the ceiling, whence there still shone a 
sad grey light on the figure of the doctor as he lit a 
lamp with a heavy shade and placed it on a table in 
the middle of the room.

Clarke looked about him. Scarcely a foot of wall 

remained bare; there were shelves all around laden 
with bottles and phials of all shapes and colours, and 
at one end stood a little Chippendale book-case. Raymond pointed to this.

'You see that parchment Oswald Crollius? He was 

one of the first to show me the way, though I don’t 
think he ever found it himself. That is a strange saying of his: ‘In every grain of wheat there lies hidden 
the soul of a star.’'

There was not much furniture in the laboratory. 

The table in the centre, a stone slab with a drain in 
one corner, the two armchairs on which Raymond 
and Clarke were sitting; that was all, except an oddlooking chair at the furthest end of the room. Clarke 
looked at it, and raised his eyebrows.

'Yes, that is the chair,' said Raymond. 'We may as 

well place it in position.' He got up and wheeled the 
chair to the light, and began raising and lowering it, 
letting down the seat, setting the back at various angles, and adjusting the foot-rest. It looked comfortable enough, and Clarke passed his hand over the soft 
green velvet, as the doctor manipulated the levers.

'Now, Clarke, make yourself quite comfortable. I 

have a couple hours’ work before me; I was obliged 
to leave certain matters to the last.'

Raymond went to the stone slab, and Clarke 

watched him drearily as he bent over a row of phials and lit the flame under the crucible. The doctor 
had a small hand-lamp, shaded as the larger one, on a 
ledge above his apparatus, and Clarke, who sat in the 
shadows, looked down at the great shadowy room, 
wondering at the bizarre effects of brilliant light and 
undefined darkness contrasting with one another. 
Soon he became conscious of an odd odour, at first 
the merest suggestion of odour, in the room, and as 
it grew more decided he felt surprised that he was 
not reminded of the chemist’s shop or the surgery. 
Clarke found himself idly endeavouring to analyse 
the sensation, and half conscious, he began to think 
of a day, fifteen years ago, that he had spent roaming through the woods and meadows near his own 
home. It was a burning day at the beginning of August, the heat had dimmed the outlines of all things 
and all distances with a faint mist, and people who 
observed the thermometer spoke of an abnormal 
register, of a temperature that was almost tropical. 
Strangely that wonderful hot day of the fifties rose 
up again in Clarke’s imagination; the sense of dazzling all-pervading sunlight seemed to blot out the 
shadows and the lights of the laboratory, and he felt