The Voice in the Night

"The Voice in the Night" is a short story by William Hope Hodgson, first published in 1907.

In this story, a schooner at sea ("becalmed in the Northern Pacific") is approached in the middle of "a dark, starless night" by a small rowboat. The passenger aboard the ship, who refuses to bring his boat close alongside and requests that the sailors on the schooner put away their lantern, tells a disturbing tale. Initially begging food for his fiancee, he receives a box of foodstuffs, floated to him in a wooden box. Later that same evening he returns to report that his fiancee is grateful for the food, but will soon die, and he tells the sailors his full story.

He and his fiancee, aboard the ship "Albatross", were abandoned by the ship's crew, who took the lifeboats. Building a raft, the two escaped from the sinking vessel and found another nearby ship in a lagoon, apparently abandoned, and covered with a fungus-like growth. They attempt to remove this growth from the living quarters but are unable to do so; it continues to spread, and so they return to their raft. The nearby island, however, is also covered with this growth. Eventually the speaker and his fiancee find the fungus growing on their skin and feel an uncontrollable urge to eat the fungus. They discover that other humans on the island have apparently been entirely absorbed and become one with the strange fungal growth.

As the speaker in the rowboat rows away, just as the sky is lightening, the narrator can dimly see a grotesquely misshapen form in the rowboat, scarcely recognizeable as human.

Weird fungi in the shape of animals or humans are a recurring theme in Hodgson's stories and novels; for example, in the novel The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" the survivors of a shipwreck come across tree-like plants that mimic (or, perhaps, have absorbed) birds and people.

Film

This story was adapted into the films Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People (1963) and as a one-hour made-for-television movie [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0714219/ Suspicion] (1958) starring James Coburn and Barbara Rush, presented as part of an Alfred Hitchcock series.

Comic Books

Doug Wheeler adapted the concept for his run on DC Comic' Swamp Thing, even naming the main villain Matango.

imilar works

John Brosnan's novel The Fungus from 1985 has a similar plot, where a mutated fungi destroys England, and those infected dies or becomes mutated mushroom people, depending on what kind of fungus they have become infected with.

Brian Lumley's short story "Fruiting Bodies", which won the British Fantasy Award in 1989, concerns a strange fungus that slowly destroys a town and ultimately consumes the bodies of the last remaining residents but keeps their form. The story ends ominously as wood from the town has been harvested for use in homes across England, and the narrator has inhaled spores from the strange fungi.