The Voice in the Night

A becalmed schooner is hailed in the night fog by a man in a small boat who will not come into the light. In exchange for food he tells his story: he and his love were shipwrecked, drifted to a derelict and then to a low grey island, and found both covered in a soft clinging fungus. Slowly it took them, growing on them and in them, until to eat was to become it.

They fled the company of clean people out of shame and mercy. He asks for the food, takes it, and rows back into the dark. At dawn the crew glimpse what hailed them. Hodgson's quietest and most pitiful horror, it is the root of every fungal transformation in the genre since. The Archive keeps it to a hush over the band, a voice out of the fog that will not come aboard.