Pan's Labyrinth: The Labyrinth of the Faun

by Guillermo del Toro

Once upon a time, but not long ago, there lived a Child Eater in an ancient forest. The villagers who picked up the deadwood under the trees to get through the winter called him the Pale Man. His victims were so numerous their names covered many walls in the halls he’d built underground, below the forest. He made their bones into furniture as delicate as their limbs, and their screams were the music that accompanied his feasting at the very table on which he’d killed so many of them. The winding corridors of the Child Eater’s lair had been designed to make the chase more enjoyable. Children could be surprisingly fast, as the Pale Man knew. After all he’d been human himself once, but his murders of children had turned him into something else, faceless and ageless, one of his kind. Cruelty had been his craft since he was a boy. Even then people called him Pálido, for he didn’t like to be in the sun, so his skin was always as pale as a watery moon. He first practiced on insects, then birds, then his mother’s cats. He killed the first child when he was only thirteen—his younger brother, who he had both loved and envied.