“The Voice in the Night” (1907)

[spoilers] I like this story by William Hope Hodgson pretty well—certainly my favorite of his many seagoing stories I’ve read. It may be more squarely in the traditions of “weird” than horror but it’s still creepy and unsettling. In a way it’s kind of a “lost world” story. But what a horrible lost world. More than anything it’s a seagoing tale, specifically within that a “fog” or “doldrums” story, a Hodgson staple. There’s a ship, and it is stuck in still waters and haze, with no wind. In the night, after some time there, a voice is heard calling out of the darkness, begging for food. The man calling refuses to let himself be seen. It’s annoying behavior that makes it hard to hand off food. But they manage. Some time later, the next night or maybe a few more, the voice returns to explain himself and his partner. The story involves shipwreck and struggling to survive on an island infested with a gray fungus and nothing to eat. The story is just well done. I had a bad feeling about that fungus from the first it’s seen, but it’s mostly innocuous for quite a while. Then it’s a nuisance and finally a fearsome force. It’s all over everything and if you scrub it away it returns the next day. Then it starts infecting the castaways themselves, with the gray fungus appearing on patches of their skin. As food stores dwindle, however, they find that not only is the fungus edible but it’s also quite tasty, though it hastens the infection. Late in the story a humanoid shape is seen in the fungus, moving like a living person. Details like this reminded me of the movie Annihilation and were particularly effective. For once one of these old-fashioned framing devices works. There’s a fair amount of setup but the payoff is this amazing story related by a voice calling out of the darkness. Hodgson gives us a glimpse of the terror near the end, the lumbering humanoid mass of gray fungus, but otherwise keeps a light hand. It’s also a good idea to make the voice a married man. He and his wife are alone together in this, trying to keep each other alive. So it’s also an affecting love story. I don’t know that you can call this gray fungus supernatural—it’s plausible enough, in 1907, that such things could exist. It may be a stretch to make it delicious, and also that it may have psychic powers of attraction, but I’m even willing to accept those things here. Hodgson makes it all work.

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"The Whistling Room" (1910)

I liked this story by William Hope Hodgson pretty well, though it wears its mystery story formula on its sleeve. It's part of a series featuring a psychic investigator named Carnacki (not to be confused with Johnny Carson's Carnac the Magnificent). Carnacki is a rational man of science but more willing than Sherlock Holmes to credit the supernatural. He's also not nearly as erudite as H.P. Lovecraft's various library-bound bookworms. Once it gets down to business "The Whistling Room" is full of good effects plus one that goes ridiculously over the top. Without a doubt this is a story about the supernatural. Specifically, a haunted room in a castle, which emits unnerving and sometimes very loud whistling tones at night, "an extraordinary, grotesque parody of human whistling, too gigantic to be human—as if something gargantuan and monstrous made the sounds softly." Carnacki does resort to peppering his pursuit of a solution with Lovecraft-type nonsense syllable words (I suspect a linguist would trace the mumbo-jumbo of both Hodgson and Lovecraft unerringly to English, as they have with Christian "speaking in tongues" episodes), e.g., "the Unknown Last Line of the Saaamaaa Ritual" (dig those crazy extra As). "The Whistling Room" is a decent ghost story but actually even more skillful as a mystery. At one point midway a red herring makes it appear it might somehow be natural phenomena after all. The weird stuff is weird and gets systematically weirder, though it's decidedly cerebral. Helpful explanations are sprinkled in along the way. I like how parts of it are knowable and other parts are not. Too much is knowable, unfortunately, but it preserves some element of the unknown even as Carnacki is a show-offy know-it-all like Sherlock Holmes, with elementary my dear sir explanations for many things. I love the climaxing image (spoiler)—the room itself is whistling, the wood planking floor animated into lips—but it's also fairly silly in the larger haunted house scheme of things. Still, all's well that ends well for Carnacki and his little band of followers hanging on every word. It is tidy business indeed with the satisfaction of a mystery laid to rest, packed full of incident, moves at good tempo, and manages some nice scares too.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories for Late at Night, ed. Robert Arthur (out of print)
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