Pan of the Woods

Part 1: The Forest

The forest grew into sight around her, the wet smell of damp ground washed out by rain and hail held the scent of mud and humidity. She awoke to silence, the chirping of birds were nowhere to be found and no flies buzzed as she regained consciousness. Without a single idea of how she got here, she looked about her, grappling with the large tree she stood against. With her eyes to the floor, she saw a gnawed rope, gnawed like an animal would - realising she must have at some point, been tied to the tree she let out a small gasp. It echoed around her in the endless lines of trees upon trees. She felt up the bark for any clues, as if there would be any, but got a handful of splinters instead. The taste of dry, murky air lifted around her and she straightened her clothing alongside cautious movements forward. The rope lay about the tree as a checkpoint and whether forward was really the way she was going, she didn’t know.

As she entered what seemed to be the threshold of the next section of forest, she noticed how the trees looked older, bigger and wider than the previous ones did. She craned her neck to see that they were taller and their leaves were more pronounced, almost covering the sky above and shrouding her in greenery and darkness. A maze of woodland and mud, she strode through it, eager to see where she was going to end up. The smell of rain had nearly disappeared and had been replaced with a hazy mist which lifted from the floor like smoke. Casting her eyes around she realised that she could not see the ending to the forest left or right, forwards or backwards. As she looked back she could only make out the faint outline of the rope that still lay on the floor around a newer looking tree. She turned to face the way she was walking once more and, out of what seemed like her blindspot, saw a figure. It was as if she had seen a hidden child out there in the forest - a child that hid amongst the trees and was trying not to be seen by anyone. Dismissing it as a possible mirage from dehydration, she kept walking as she tried to ignore the thought of what she believed she saw.

The next part of the forest was even older, now hanging with discarded cobwebs which the spiders no longer inhabited as they were long dead. There was no longer any mud but the grass was lifeless and dying. The trees were closely packed together, so much so that she now had to climb around instead of walk on the muddy ground which she would have much preferred at this point. The sky above her head was no longer visible. The image of clouds and night were replaced with huge tufts of trees latticing and weaving above, not an inch of moonlight able to breakthrough. The only moonlight which was visible came from the newer sections of tree and looked as if it were pointing to something. Pushing her way along, the line of light was so focused that she couldn’t possibly see what was at the end of it, only that it disappeared somewhere into the distance. With the only compass being the line of moonlight, she followed it with the intent of finding its meaning whilst also trying to forget that the child may be at the end. Not knowing what it wanted, she took off her belt and held it as a whip in her hand - her only weapon against whatever was playing tricks on her.

The tops of the trees themselves were not visible so she couldn’t see which trees belonged to which leaves but as she turned her whole body around she realised that the tree which had the rope around the bottom was no longer visible even if she were to look hard into the distance. The fog and tight-packed trees had made it impossible to see even the second threshold and she had to accept that she was in a part of the woods unexplored by many. As the age of the trees slowly increased and their density went up ten-fold, she found it more and more difficult to shuffle between them. She had gone from walking between the trees to lumbering over a couple to climbing through them and now, she was barely squeezing in. It was a nightmare but she had to press on if she wanted to find out where she was. She continued following the ever-thinning path of moonlight that now shone almost directly at the floor - so she knew she was close.

As the moonlight was seen hitting something, she pushed through the very last tree she could take and came out to an odd circle of nothing. There were no trees, no leaves, there was not even grass. She was standing on stone. The murky air had lifted and been replaced by a budding sweet smell and the rancid turn of dead flowers. She trampled them as she walked forwards and quickly realised that the moonlit path fell square on to a cave. It lit the entrance to it, or at least it lit the spot where the entrance was supposed to be. There were multiple rocks in the way which she began to remove one by one, choosing that she should spend the night here, only knowing it was day when the moonlight speck she could see from the inside had disappeared entirely.

As she awoke on what she believed was the next day, she picked up one of the stones, realising that she could not see what it said but it said something, she held it against her and began to walk from the cave. The smell of dead flowers and honey was almost gone and she realised that without the moonlit path, she was basically blind to the forest. She felt around, hoping that she would not encounter that image of a child again and held tight the stone with the possible markings on it in her other hand. It was then she heard a faint sound though she could not see where it was coming from. It was like the sound of heavy feet running but it wasn’t very loud. She decided to come out of the cave to try to find its source. It had vanished before she could do so.

She made her way towards the newer trees and saw that the sunlight was coming down through them. It was then that she made a terrifying discovery. She looked at the stone she had brought from the cave and saw that it not only contained markings, but it seemed to depict some sort of sect dedicated to worshipping a man who was half-goat and stood around ten feet tall. He towered over them with a vengeful look on his face and was a hideous beast. The people below him knelt at his hooves and his legs were that of a goat too. The light and colour drained from her face as she turned the stone over and witnessed the next part to this horrifying story for a woman was offered up to this god and was not only struck down, but eaten so that she was in two pieces.

She turns around in broad daylight and notices she can see the cave’s opening now. It is filled with jars of honey and goat skulls. Dead flowers cover the top as blood has dried around the mouth. Symbols written on the outer walls, one depicts a 10-foot half-goat monster of a man who, with his horns dripping with blood, sees over mankind holding a flute. She shrieks and runs in the opposite direction but cannot help and think of the little girl who may or may not, be lost in the woods. Looking around though, she finds nothing and accepts it was a trick of the mind. Then she hears it, louder this time. The clamouring of hooves are closer than before as if they are following her. They get louder and louder until they stop. They stop as if he is right behind her. She doesn’t turn around but she runs out into the newer trees. She keeps running until the newer trees become shrubs and plants, then flowers, then stalks and then… she sees the road. The hooves have stopped and she still carries this strange and frightening stone.

Part 2: The Road

She never forgot what she saw in the cave as she looked up and down an empty stretch of road that may as well have been the forest too. She looked up at the sky above her and almost thanked god for the state of the sun though it was only just peaking through grey clouds. It would rain later than day which meant she and the weird stone needed to find shelter quickly. She had no coat and wore no jacket, she was not designed to be left out in the storm and though she pondered on it, she did think back to how she must have been left outside in the midst of a storm but was bone dry. She tried to shake the thought from her head and, with the stone under one arm, began to drag her feet up the lifeless road.

There were no cars, no trucks or lorries, not a single person walking by and no single vehicle running on. The smell of petrol was nowhere to be found and the taste in the air still felt like the woodlands behind her. She passed the long lines of brand new trees that gated the forest, hiding the much more sinister part from view. She tried to see if she could look inside but saw nothing past the shadows of trees that lined up against each other. The sounds of swaying in the fine but cold breeze was all that could be heard. That was until she stopped to listen closer. No, she knew it was not the sound of the breeze. She could hear it faintly in the distance like a bad feeling of something to come but also, something she could do nothing about. A sickness in her stomach churned her to wake up from the nightmare as the sound of the unmistakable hooves against the ground became slightly louder but not loud enough to inspire her to run. She looked around and she saw nothing. She kept making her way up the road and, though walking quicker than before, the sound of hooves got neither louder nor quieter. She came out on to a small village a half hour later and by then, the sound of hooves had mysteriously stopped as if they were following her here. Yet again, there was nobody anywhere to be found.

It began to rain and though it was quiet and light at first, she made for the nearest building when it started coming down harder, scared she would mistake the next movement of hooves for rain and forget that this invisible monster was catching up with her somehow. The building was a weird hostel for the homeless and though she felt easy first, she could see someone watching her as she walked around the foyer floor. He eyed her up as she spoke to the front desk about the possibility of staying overnight in a room so that she could go home the next day. He was a rugged man who watched with the intensity of knowing and foreboding. His brown hair fell about his eyes and shrouded them slightly, his ragged clothes told her he had been in this hostel for a while without luck and as he moved towards her, she said nothing but waited for him like a character from a video game waiting to be spoken to. She stood clutching the stone tighter than before, this time it was wrapped across her chest, the symbol of the goat-headed creature pushed outward so that nobody else came near her. He smelt like tobacco and whisky as he took a seat on the couch near her. It was ripped up from years of disrepair and so, she sat opposite on a wooden chair. His eyes met hers in a gaze that said he was concerned about the safety of everyone else except for her.

“What are you doing with that? His voice was a growl akin to a bear. His face contorted into an angry and yet unforgiving frown. “Where did you find it?”

Stating that she found it in a cave in the forest, she said she was planning to have it looked at by a researcher ‘or something’ as she had no idea what it was, where it came from or why it was there. The cave, she followed on, was also a strange place to be. It was almost like a forest shrine for something, or someone.

“You didn’t see anything, did you?” She shook her head quickly after he asked this question, not wanting to tell him about the small child hiding amongst the trees, not that it would make any difference. She knew she was about to get some fairytale of the village from this guy who would believe that she ate a live chicken in front of him if she just said that she did. She knew he was vulnerable and gullible but nothing could prepare her for what was next.

“You didn’t hear anything, did you?” She thought about whether to tell him or not and then she just blurted out that she didn’t remember hearing anything in the forest. “No? Not like hooves. Not like hooves running?” She stared wide into his eyes and frowned a frown that let him know that she was lying about not having heard anything. “You’ve heard him…”

When she asked who this ‘him’ was that he was talking about, he began to tell her a story that if it weren’t for her encounter with the wilderness, she wouldn’t believe due to its far-fetched nature. Unfortunately, it aligned almost perfectly with her experience. “The forest folk made a woodland shrine to the Greek god of the wilderness, Pan.” He lowered his voice as if someone somewhere were listening in on this conversation and, as if it were forbidden somehow. “They kept at it day and night and as they did, they continued to grow the forest, making it bigger and bigger so that it consumed parts of our town. I think they knew something you see. They knew what they had unleashed through all of their rituals and sacrifices.”

She was too enthralled in the story to care too much about whether it was completely true or not. “As the forest got bigger, the cult also became smaller. Some said that due to the fact they lived out by the caves where no animals lived, they began to eat each other. And now you’re going to ask why they didn’t leave the woods. Well, that’s interesting…” He asked for some tomato soup for the two of them to eat while he told the next part of the story and thus, he continued. The woman looked on intent on knowing what the stone she had actually represented. “They didn’t leave the woods because they knew what they had done. They had unleashed something raw and unknown on to the world and they were trying to keep it in.”

The woman looked puzzled and asked what they were trying to keep in and for what good was it. “Ah…Now that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?” He smiled the first smile she had seen of him. “That’s where the prize is.” He gestured towards the stone. “Some say that whatever they unleashed must have been that thing on the stone.” He chortled. “Of course, as if the Greek god Pan would come to this terrible part of town in this terrible state, in this rotten country… I’m sorry…” Rubbing his brow, he continued. “One day, in the woods, the police went looking for information on a missing girl who had been playing with the stone in the cave the last time she was seen alive. She had just disappeared and so had the entire cult. Nobody knows where she is and…” He stopped when he realised the woman was now looking at the floor, confused and bewildered. “And you’ve seen her hiding in the woods, haven’t you?”

At first, she pretended to have no idea what he was talking about but he caught the wind of her facial expressions moving the muscles on the sides of her mouth. They both knew that she couldn’t hide the fact for much longer and began to tell him how he had seen a small girl hiding in the woods, she weaved through the trees as if she didn’t want to be seen at all. “And she doesn’t.” He continued. “She doesn’t want to be found.” Asking if she is a member of the undead got the reply of unnecessarily loud laughter. “What? No. She’s alive, she just doesn’t want to be found.” The thought of leaving a little girl who could be no older than five alone in a dark forest with that horned thing was enough to make her heave. Her chest became heavy with the thought of it and her dizziness got the better of her as she frowned further. Offering her a piece of bread to keep herself afloat, the man continued to tell the story of all that happened and all who had disappeared. He spoke in a low, rusty tone, moving in towards her as he did.

Part 3: The Missing

“It began some years back, well I would say some but you would say many since you’re so young. There were people turning up missing everywhere. Most of the people who turned up missing had something to do with the forest somehow. For example: the first one I had personally been close to was probably the third or fourth person to be noted as missing in the first five years of the woodland trickery.

My friend, let’s call him ‘A’. My friend A was training to be a professor of history and would go out on occasion to study the woods and their layouts. He found out tons about this place, things that would probably have stumped regular forest hunters even today. One of the things he found out is the design of the woodlands is not just a series of deeper, older layers as if it had been build outwards, but even the layers within themselves had designs. The spacious design of the outer layer is done on purpose to let people see into the forest. Well, at least they think they can see in, that’s the important thing. It is supposed to act as a trap. People look in, think they can see all the way in and it looks all pretty and inviting and then they start walking, and walking and walking until they get to… Well apparently, they get to a cave.

When he found the cave it was covered in plants, moss and flowers, it was exactly how you had described it - painted with weird symbols and images of the horned beast god, Pan. But before we go on to that, there was another designed associated with the trees. No, it isn’t Pan’s maze or whatever they call it. It’s a zig-zag pattern that keeps getting closer together the more you move towards the middle. When you get to the cave, the zig-zag pattern goes the opposite way on the other side. The cave is not the end of the forest, it’s the middle. It is the exact same size in the other direction, you see.

Anyways, when he saw the cave, something told him not to go inside and to stay where he was. Instead of heading into the cave, he headed around it and went down the other side of the forest. He ran down the other side like the wind, fighting his way through tree trunks and then through the patterned trees and then finally out the other end. I don’t know what happened to him but by the time he came back, he couldn’t stop looking over his shoulder and he asked me if I could hear what he hears. At that time we all thought it was a bit of a joke and being that he was our friend, we choose to take him for a ride and pretend as if we could hear it too. I couldn’t hear anything he heard and neither could anyone else.

Unfortunately, as he became more and more withdrawn I was the only one of our friendship group that thought he probably wasn’t joking about that noise he was hearing and so, I went to his house to ask him what it was. It turns out that instead of training for becoming a professor like he was meant to be doing, he was lying in bed staring at the ceiling, flat on his back. His bedsheets were strewn across the windows as if he didn’t want anyone seeing out or in and his curtains were not enough. The air was hot and murky because the windows hadn’t been opened ever since he came back from the forest and even the carpet was starting to turn.

I told him as best I could that I believed him and that this time I wasn’t joking and wanted to hear what he had to say about the sound in his head. He told me it was like the sound of hooves constantly getting louder and louder as if someone were following him quickly upon horseback from behind. He would then look around and the noise would suddenly stop - there would never be anything there. He told me that he was even more frightened by this because ‘imagine what would happen if someday, something was there…’ I breathed in a gasp of air as he said this because in my mind, this guy was positively loopy. ‘If anything happens to me. I want you to know it was the forest.’ I asked him what he meant and he said ‘the forest never lets you go once it has you. Even if you get out, it wants to grab you in its twigs and branches and boughs and drag you back, kicking and screaming, into the depths of the darkest parts of the undiscovered woods.’

I was a little shaken by this yes, but more so by his behaviour. He was looking at with these wide eyes and the whites were more white than usual, his skin had grown pale with the lack of sun and he had an expression on his face that said the words left unsaid were stuck in his throat. It was uncomfortable but I listened on about how he spoke of the weird things he was hearing, the hooves getting closer and closer without anyone being around was just the start. He started hearing taps on his window, light like rain though there was none. The summer saw little rainfall and so, nothing could explain the rhythmic tapping he heard though nobody else could.

His mother was about to have him admitted to an asylum two days after my visit. She had gone into his room to open his window to find it already open. She looked around for him to see where he was, happy that he may have been up and about for the first time in a long while, but as she searched and searched, it was clear he was nowhere to be seen. He had vanished completely and nobody knew where he was or what he had disappeared to do. Lots of people began speculating that he had probably run off at the sound of his mother submitting his medical records to the head psychiatrist at the asylum out of town, but I think there was something much more. I think he was hearing something and that something, or someone did actually get to him.

His bedroom window was just above the garden where his mother grew things like coriander and carrots - light herbs and vegetables. She had taken him back in after the incident and was very protective over his care, knowing when he needed food and what kinds of food may make him feel better. The window wasn’t broken or dislodged, it was merely open as if he had opened it by himself. When I visited the house a day after his disappearance, I went outside to collect a portion of carrots his mother had grown for me to take home and that was when I knew he wasn’t lying about anything. He wasn’t pulling our leg, he wasn’t mad and he wasn’t completely gone with the fairies. Instead, he was right all along. I took the carrots and then turned for one last look of his bedroom. I saw on the wall of the house this weird mark in mud, like that of an animal hoof. It was beside his windowsill and balanced on the space between the sill and the brick. It looked like someone, or something, had climbed into his room with some kind of permission and stole the man right out of bed.

That was not even the last of it though. A few days later, I went exploring in the very same woods, trying to find out what was hunting him. I didn’t get any further than the second set of trees as I couldn’t squeeze myself between the larger, much older ones. I didn’t hear anything that he heard and definitely wasn’t haunted when I came out. I did see a shadow of something though - it wasn’t a little girl. It was a half-man, half-goat entity and I knew then, that I had seen something that I was not meant to see. I knew I had seen something he may have seen and I turned and bolted right out of the woods before anything came towards me. Not man, not goat, not anything.

Now what you have there is one of the stones from the cave. You shouldn’t have picked that up. The large and towering shadow I saw looked like that drawing etched on to it. I’m not sure who the broken person is representing A or not, but I certainly hope it isn’t. I hope that wherever he is, he is calm and happy and hopefully, still alive. Though, as every day moves along slowly and steadily, I doubt it. I certainly doubt it."

Part 4: The Room

Room 30 was on the bottom floor, just as she preferred. She was handed a key just as the man opposite her had finished talking and, in tandem, they finished their soup. “Don’t go chasing shadows…” He said as he got up to go to bed. “Where does it leave us?” His hands dropped to his sides and the smell of tomato soup was slowly carried away with the plates picked up between waiting shifts. He walked off into the distance and took the stairs. She found it daunting that he never located at least a clue as to what happened to his friend, but she also tried to dismiss it as an old wives’ tale that was told around campfires and was probably not something literal. Though, what A did certainly aligned with the things she had experienced herself. This rattled around in her skull, an idea twisting her mind over and over again. On one hand, she didn’t want to believe it and on the other hand, she knew it was true. Another thing she knew was true is that something horrible definitely happened to A out in the woods though, nothing horrible really happened to her apart from seeing the little girl and the weird etchings on the cave. The haunting that A experienced afterwards was definitely the same as hers but there was every suggestion it was also a lot more horrifying.

She shut the door behind her and the room, littered with dead bugs and shrouded in the warm glow of a broken light, seemed too cold for her to sleep in. She shivered at the thought of it and tried her best to turn on the radiator though it wouldn’t budge. She wrapped her arms about herself in an attempt to warm up and sat with her legs to her chest on the bed which was also freezing cold with thin sheets. Her mind turned immediately to how the people who owned the homeless hostel had probably spent less money on building these rooms so that they could build hundreds of them. It was no wonder why there was hardly anyone here but apparently a requirement for a homeless hostel at all. It made her feel a bit sick and she got up out of bed to pace around the room, trying again to warm up.

She opened the window slightly to feel around for the temperature and though it was only slightly warmer, she left the window that slither open and tried to get some sleep. It didn’t work and she was quickly out of bed again within half an hour. She couldn’t understand what her mind was playing at. She had seen something, she knew it. She had heard things too and that man knew it. A faint rustling was happening outside her bedroom door and so, she went to open it. There was nothing yet again. She heard it again, but faster and though she was standing with the door wide open, there was nothing there. She remembered what the man had said to her about not chasing shadows and slammed the door, pressing her back against it as she locked it in place.

She held her head in her hands when she began to hear the rustling again. Begging it to get out of her head she banged her forehead against the nearest wall but it wouldn’t go away. The rustling got louder a little until she could hear the tapping of feet. It wasn’t coming from outside her door this time, it was getting closer. She checked once more to be sure but shut the door again and backed up towards the bed.

As she approached the bed, she began to hear the hooves tapping on the floor. By now, it surrounded her so much that she couldn’t tell where they were coming from. All at once, they sounded as if they were coming from outside her bedroom door, and then from behind her and then, once again, from above her. It filled her head with the paranoid tapping and then it got louder and louder, faster and faster. The hooves sounded like the were running towards her, catching up with her as she tried to hide beneath the table that stood closest to the window.

The hooves just got louder until she felt the room begin to shake a little. She got out from under the table, scared it may fall on her and she stood, in the middle of the room as the hooves came nearer and nearer with intensity and speed. Her heart and her mind raced in tandem as if they had the same rhythm as the feet of the goat god. She cried out as tears ran down her face but nobody heard her. There was nobody else on the bottom floor. Not a single person would come and from the bottom of her soul, she knew that she would end the same way as A from the man’s story of his missing friend.

And then everything stopped. The sound of the hooves was no more. The room stopped shaking and she almost stopped crying. But then she saw it. It was just as he described. She froze where she was standing, unable to approach it. The window was darkened by the midnight air and it showed the faint outline of a goat’s head with horns. He got up from all fours and stood, like a man at approximately ten feet tall. He bent down slowly and put his goatish hand against the glass of the window and, as it was only open a slither, he fixed his claws against the opening. She couldn’t even scream as he moved the window open and revealed the terrifying face of Pan, the great goat god.

He entered the room through the window and stood, facing her and arched down from the low ceiling. She shuddered in fright as he reached out a long, hairy animalistic arm and grabbed her shoulder with his clawed hand.

And with that, she was gone. The only thing left behind was the stone. The stone, which showed her own fate.

Part 5: The Refugee

Screams came from the forest floor as people gathered around to witness the ripping of a human woman. Animals, humans and many more weird creatures of the woods were standing around the cave. Some were ten feet tall and others were no bigger than a pencil. The smell of the forest was that of freshly washed flowers and the beauty of the morning was almost too much to bear for some as they had not seen this event in a long, long while. They crowded around the mouth to the cave and watched as Pan emerged with the human woman bound by the mouth, hands and feet and covered in flowers. Pan held her above his head as she squirmed and resisted. The creatures around screamed out again in pure excitement. She tried to break free but it was no use.

A legislation was read out by Pan which mentioned how a human woman, a mortal, came into his home and stole his things. When said like this, many humans would probably see why Pan was angry. He showed the woman off by holding her high above his head, arms outstretched and turned around amongst the crowd. Then, as he walked back to the entrance, everyone fell silent immediately.

No sound was heard for a long while as Pan held the woman from her middle. She could only be heard crying and squirming about but knew it was of no use. Within that instant, Pan ripped her in half and bones, blood and more went flying into the crowd. The skin tearing and the ribs breaking, the woman died only a half minute later, spending almost thirty seconds in absolute agony, screaming through the bandage.

As she died, she could see the small girl waiting in the trees and watching on. When the woman was ripped apart, the little girl squeezed her eyes shut, not wanting to see all the gore that was about to unfold. She didn’t see the aftermath as she took off to run in the opposite direction, out of the woods and into the road.

Whilst the creatures feasted on the woman, all except for Pan who was busy mourning the images he had lost on the missing stone, the little girl ran down the streets outside the woods and past the lifeless roads that encircled the town. Hoping not to be seen by anyone, she knew she was risking a great amount of her freedom in the forest. She peered through windows and looked through keyholes, but couldn’t find anything. Ultimately, she came to a window which was marked mysteriously by a muddy hoof on the place between the sill and the brick. She pried it open slightly and pulled herself up to get inside.

Looking around at the dead insects and the slight amounts of blood that littered the floor, she found the stone and tucked it into her big red coat. Moving her short hair from her face, she zipped the coat off and trundled back over to the forest.

The creatures had dispersed and noted how they hadn’t had a meal that good since the last person stole shavings of wood from the forest to prove how old the trees were. He was seen running through the woodlands and didn’t stop for the cave. They were initially impressed how long he had spent inside the forest, but ultimately they also knew Pan would not let him live having stolen something from his life’s work and the shrine that others had so lovingly left for him.

The goat god stood amongst the dispersed creatures and claimed that though he was still sad for the lost stone, this was still an auspicious day since the creatures had been fed such a blessed meal. The creatures, standing on various parts of the ground agreed and felt too, Pan’s sadness for his lost stone.

It was at this particular moment that a tiny child of no more than five years’ old came running and climbing and clambering through the woods. She stood beneath Pan’s gaze as he watched her with initial discontent and tears welled up in her eyes. She was scared yes, but she was more concerned that she would be found out and have to return to the town once again and she surely would have been seen. She came from a quietly abusive household which some knew about and others didn’t. Her mother would tie her up in the basement and refuse to feed her or let her outside. And so, as revenge, she put sleeping pills in her mother’s food and tied her up in the forest. The gnawed rope was all that was left of her.

She undid her big red coat and took from it a stone which depicted her mother’s death. She unzipped her pockets and took from them the wooden shavings that were lost all that time ago, she had been collecting lost things from the cave to return them to their rightful owner in hope that she could live outside one day. In her hands, she cupped them and offered them back to Pan who took them with delight in his eyes. He held the little girl’s hands in his own and patted her on the head lightly.

And the legend says that Pan took the child as his own and they walked off, hand-in-hand, into the depths of the woods and the quiet of the cave.