Lovecraft, despite poor health and lifelong hypochondria,
did not actually dwell much on strange malevolent diseases—at least not on a
personal, individual level. For him,
infection or contagion were at the social, even national level. Society as he cherished it was here and there
succumbing to idolatrous cults that were spreading their venomous practices, or
else surrendering to relentless hereditary horrors passed down generations. Lovecraft’s preoccupation with idolatry,
corruption, and miscegenation comes out of his New England Calvinism; his is a
Puritanism without salvation. For
spiritual illness and anxiety, there was no cure, not even comfort—only
vigilant waiting.
A different approach is in view in William Hope Hodgson’s
The Voice in the Night (1907). The version I have is in a collection of the
author’s work called The Ghost pirates
and Others: The Best of William Hope Hodgson, (2012), published by Night
Shade Books. The story was made into at
least one film, a Japanese adaptation called Matango, Fungus of Terror, also known as Attack of the Mushroom People (1963). This is a very strange movie, but
effective. Themes of addiction and
betrayal, lightly touched on in the original, are amplified in the movie.
In Hodgson’s story, a schooner somewhere in the north
Pacific is hailed by another boat. Mist
and darkness keep the vessel invisible from the narrator and his crew. “It came again—a voice curiously throaty and
inhuman, calling from somewhere upon the dark sea…” The caller asks them to put
away their lamps before he will approach, adding to the mystery. He and a woman who is with him are desperate
for food, and the sailors on the schooner are generous to him, floating a box
of provisions over to the other vessel.
But he will not come close to them, nor board their ship.
Later, the strange caller returns across the water to
thank and bless the men on the
schooner for their kindness. He feels
that it is “God’s wish that we should tell to you all that we have suffered…” In the misty darkness, invisible to the
schooner’s crew, he proceeds to tell the story of what happened to him and his fiancé.
Abandoned at sea when their ship is destroyed in a storm,
he and the woman drift for days on a small raft. Their doomed ship was called the Albatross. Hodgson has placed this name in the middle of
his story as a kind of archaic hypertext—click on it and you will find it
refers to the poem The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
In the poem, an old sailor tells how his ship was followed by the giant
sea bird, which brought good fortune to the crew as they struggled through icy
seas at the South Pole.
In
mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It
perched for vespers nine;
Whiles
all the night, through fog-smoke white
Glimmered
the white Moon-shine.
“God
save thee, ancient Mariner!
From
the fiends, that plague thee thus!—
Why
look’st thou so—With my crossbow
I
shot the Albatross.
Disaster follows for the ancient Mariner’s crew, who
blame him for all the misfortunes he caused by killing “a bird of good omen”.
Ah ! well a-day ! what
evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
So the Albatross, originally a blessing, becomes a
curse. There are several interesting parallels
between the classic poem and Hodgson’s story, including references to an
impending wedding, severe hunger and thirst, a curse and faith.
Hodgson’s ‘Voice in the Night’ continues his tale: the couple finds themselves washed into a large
shallow lagoon. They find an abandoned
ship, which they search for provisions. Here
and there, over the surface of the ship are “odd patches of that queer fungus”,
which they clean away to make lodging for the night. But the fungus is strangely resilient, and
soon returns. That is because this is no ordinary fungus
but a spiritual blight. It begins to
invade their belongings. They flee in a
small boat to a nearby island—and find “that here the vile fungus, which had
driven us from the ship, was growing riot.”
On the island, the extravagant growth of the fungus has
taken bizarre gigantic forms resembling trees, fingers, and…humans. Some of the fungal masses appear to move or
quake. Worse, the man and the woman find
the fungus beginning to grow on their own bodies, and can barely resist eating
the stuff. “Yet, our drear punishment
was upon us: for, day by day, with
monstrous rapidity, the fungoid growth took hold of our poor bodies.” This is a queasy allusion to the Garden of
Eden, the forbidden fruit, and its impact on Adam and Eve. The fungus seems to be a physical manifestation
of the ineradicable presence of sin.
They are doomed. But
they have isolated themselves and told their story to would be rescuers in
order to prevent others from suffering their fate. The kindness and generosity of the schooner’s
crew has provided them a last human meal, to stave off the inevitable
conversion to a nonhuman life form. There
is a haunting scene at the end where the schooner’s crew can just barely make
out the doomed man, rowing his boat back through the mist to the island, where
he and his bride-to-be will soon meet their end.
Coleridge has his ancient Mariner say:
I
pass, like night, from land to land;
I
have strange power of speech;
That
moment that his face I see,
I
know the man that must hear me:
To
him my tale I teach.
Hodgson’s story is disturbing and creepy. It also contains love, compassion, sacrifice
and faith. Indeed, these form the ultimate
antidote to the horrible fungus, and may yet save the rest of us.
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