The Voice in the Night
| "The Voice in the Night" | |
|---|---|
| Author | William Hope Hodgson |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction, horror |
| Published in | Blue Book Magazine |
| Publication date | November 1907 |
"The Voice in the Night" is a short story by William Hope Hodgson, first published in the November 1907 edition of Blue Book Magazine.
The story has been adapted a number of times, most prominently in the 1963 Japanese film Matango.
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.
After its first outing, the story was reprinted numerous times: in collections of Hodgson's stories like Deep Waters, in more general anthologies like Beyond Time and Space, as well as in other publications like Twilight Zone Magazine. It also appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's paperback anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories They Wouldn't Let Me Do on TV which appeared in several imprints, e.g. Simon and Schuster (1957); most recently by Amereon Ltd (January 2002)
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 boat, who refuses to bring his boat close alongside and requests that the sailors on the schooner put away their lanterns, tells a disturbing tale. Begging food for his fiancée, he receives a box of foodstuffs, floated to him in a wooden box. Later that same evening he returns to report that his fiancée is grateful for the food, but will soon die, and he tells the sailors his full story.
He and his fiancée, aboard the ship Albatross, were abandoned by the ship's crew, who took the lifeboats. Building a raft, they escaped from the sinking vessel and found an apparently abandoned ship in a nearby lagoon, covered with a fungus-like growth. They attempted to remove this growth from the living quarters but were unable to do so; it continued to spread, and so they returned to their raft. The nearby island was also covered with this growth, except for a narrow beach. Eventually the speaker and his fiancee found the fungus growing on their skin and felt an uncontrollable urge to eat the fungus. They discovered that other humans on the island had apparently been entirely absorbed by the strange fungal growth.
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