The Great God Pan

I did something unforgivable that can never be erased, never reversed. I crossed the oldest line there is. I had sex with my own daughter. Not once, but multiple times. And the worst part? I enjoyed it. It was the best sex I have ever had. And it made me want to throw up from guilt and disgust at how much I enjoyed my daughter's tight pussy, and how much I was still enjoying it, having sex with my daughter behind my wife's back, with the full knowledge that I had become the worst possible father to my daughter; no father should ever do what I had done, what I was still doing, and what I was still enjoying.

The worst of it is not the act. The worst of it is the hunger that survives the shame. Each time I swear I am finished, and each time the disgust curdles into something I cannot name without wanting to be sick.

There was no going back for me. Not even the church could redeem me; nothing I could do to earn forgiveness. I used to be a good Christian man, didn't I? I went to church. I prayed. I lived a good life. Then why me? Why did I turn into this? A sick pervert who has sex with his own daughter and enjoys it? I knew there was no going back after what Cassidy and I did at Halloween, so instead, I walked further into hell instead, having sex with her, again and again, until I was raw and spent, Cassidy giggling and talking dirty, "Daddy," she still called me, to remind me who I was, to remind me of the taboo I crossed, and to remind me that there was no returning from it. "Come in my mouth, Daddy, I'll swallow every last drop," my daughter said while sucking my dick, maintaining eye contact with her father all the she gave him the blowjob. She made me return the favor, so I got between daughter's thighs, kissed, licked, and ate out her pussy diligently. "Your daughter's pussy tastes the best, doesn't it, Daddy?" Cassidy asked, giggling between moans as her father tongued her pussy. "How does it feel to fuck your daughter's ass, Daddy?" my daughter asked when we had anal sex for the first time. I didn't say it out loud, but it felt amazing, and Cassidy knew it as well, as I filled her asshole with my warm sperm.

I didn’t tell my wife anything. Cassidy and I had sex behind her back, keeping her in the dark. Laura had grown fat and uninterested in sex after menopause, but I still loved her. I did, right? So many times I thought about breaking down, telling her the truth of what I had done, begging her for forgiveness. But I couldn’t. My wife might have forgiven infidelity. But incest? Sex with our own eighteen-year-old daughter? She would throw up in disgust, and I wouldn't blame her. Sometimes I wanted to do the same. But that disgust always disappeared to lust, to the taboo, to the best sex I have ever had.

I remember the day Cassidy was born. My baby girl. I remember holding her in my arms, so small, so innocent. I remember her growing older. Her first words, "daddy". She was a daddy's girl, and I loved her and spoiled her. I remember her as a toddler, running towards me. Her with braces, taking her to school, reading her bedtime stories, buying her candy. How did we get from there to here? How did everything go so wrong?

I couldn't recognize the wicked young woman who had sex with me behind my wife's back. Whose nude teen body I enjoyed and explored in detail. Into whose womb I had spilled my seed countless times by now. I didn’t want to mix her image with my sweet, innocent little girl, the one I remembered from my memories.

Sometimes, alone, I wept into my arms. Where did we go wrong? Why did this happen? Why wasn't I strong enough to resist?

And it was not just me and Cassidy. Something had changed in Hornwood since that night, the night of Halloween, when the veil between the worlds ran thinnest. The teenagers giggled, smiled, but told their parents nothing. They were in on a secret that the older people, the good Christians, were not allowed to share.

The worst was yet to come.

One Sunday in early December, Cassidy showed me a positive pregnancy test in the kitchen of our house. "I'm pregnant, Daddy, with your baby," She grinned, rubbing her belly. "You're going to be a daddy again, and also a granddaddy, at the same time. Isn't that funny?"

The horror should have made me retch. Instead I felt a dull, sickened resignation. It was the only logical result of what we had done, of me spilling my seed into my daughter's womb, night after night, again and again, but I had a feeling it had happened the very first time we had sex. She had conceived on our first night together, on that cursed Halloween that changed everything.

My wife was told that Cassidy was pregnant by her boyfriend, Tommy, though I knew that was a lie; the child growing in her belly was mine. Tommy, however, readily accepted that he was the father of her child, and so did everyone else who had been at the party. They moved around each other now like parts of the same body.

"A baby at eighteen?" My wife was deeply concerned, as mothers tended to be. "I don't mind her dating Tommy, but they should've used protection. Maybe we should consider termination; Cassidy is just a kid. They both are."

"Abortion is a sin," I said, in a voice so flat that I hardly recognized it. "We should not terminate the pregnancy, but rather support our daughter. I am financially solvent enough to provide for the child. We can think of it as a late child instead of a grandkid."

Laura didn’t suspect anything. Why would she suspect her husband to be the father of their daughter's baby? That was something too dark, too evil, too disgusting to even contemplate.

Cassidy caught my eye across the table and laughed, playful and mischievous, rubbing her baby bump, swelling with our unborn child, a child born of incest and sin and forbidden lust. "Nice acting, Daddy; Mom has no clue that it's your baby."

And it was not only us. By January every woman who had attended the party was pregnant. Brianna and Riley carried their round bellies through town with the same private, delighted smile. Then I began to notice darker things, once I knew what I was looking at: a brother with his hand on his sister's swollen stomach, both of them smiling that sick smile. A grown son standing beside his pregnant mother. A young man beside his stepmother, who was pregnant too. They looked like normal families to anyone who did not know, but I knew, and it made my skin crawl.

Thirty-eight weeks after Halloween, Cassidy went into labor. I drove my daughter to the county clinic through a hard rain. Inside, the doctors and nurses were overwhelmed, with one birth after another, and every woman in the waiting room was breathing the same way. The fruits of the seeds planted on that dark Halloween were finally coming out.

Cassidy gave birth to my baby in the same room where my wife had given birth to her. I stood against the wall and thought, absurdly, that my little girl was now a mother.

The day I took the newborn Cassidy into my arms had been the happiest day of my life. Now as the midwife placed her son in my arms, my first grandchild and and my second child, into my arms, I was filled with dread.

"It's a boy," the midwife said, smiling the same playful, mischievous smile I had seen on every face at the party.

She did not tell me the rest. The child was half mine and half my daughter's, and he was also something else. Cloven feet. A body covered in fur. Twisted limbs, and eyes that glowed. A pair of small horns curved above his brow like a crown. He did not cry. He smiled at me. His face held both my features and my daughter's, mixed, but beneath them lay something far more primal, something older than humanity.

"You didn't really think our kid would be normal, did you, Daddy?" Cassidy asked from the bed, flushed and glowing, playful and mischievous as ever. She had known. She had been expecting this all along. She had wanted it. "A boy born of the seed of a father planted into his own daughter's womb, on the blessed night of Halloween. A normal child could never come from that."

"What is he?" I managed to croak, staring at the child I had made with my daughter.

She giggled, proud and breathless. "He is the Great God Pan, Daddy. Born among us again to rule over mankind as he once did in the old days. Christianity will soon be a distant memory. The last church will burn, and the last priest will be sacrificed on the altar of the old gods." She looked at me tenderly. "And we made it happen, you and I. We should be very proud."

In my arms, my daughter's son, my son and my grandson, laughed. It was not a human laugh. It was the laugh of an old god whose time had come again.