BP9: “The Voice in the Night”

In this short story, there is a crew who encounters an old man that is begging for some help. This man was very strange because when he would give information about himself, he would pause abruptly before. The random man was also adamant about not coming too close to the boat and he would want to avoid the light at all costs. All of these details gave me suspicions that the story was going to be about sirens and that the crew was going to be led out into the water to drown. I also assumed this because he did not want any of the crew members to go to his wife, so I thought this was a way that the siren was trying to lead them out into the water.

It wasn’t until the strange man began to explain the story of how they were stranded and ultimately had to survive on their own for quite some time now. As the man is explaining his story, he mentions this strange fungus that they originally found on a random ship him and his wife came across. It was then revealed that the fungus was so severe, that even if they tried to clear it out, it would still grow back oddly enough. What I found strange was when this fungus began to spread to their clothing and then the lady’s hands. As the story goes along, it is revealed that the wife actually consumed some of the grey fungus out of desperation and lack of food. Despite having her promise never to consume the fungus again, the husband also folds at some point and eats some too. I believed at this point that this may have been because they have been surrounded by the grey fungus for so long that they had just become used to it and out of such desperation, they were curious to see if it could satisfy some kind of hunger.

The way I understood the ending was that there was some other type of entity lurking within the actual fungus making people addicted to it because the old man mentioned how while he went deep into the twisted paths, there was some type of figure of a “distorted human creature” there that attempts to strike at him and leaves some of the fungus on his lips. After licking his lips and tasting the sweetness of it, the old man strikes a hunger for the fungus and devours a load of it. It seemed to me that this fungus took over and as a person consumes it, they essentially become it, and the ending of the story reveals that. In other words, since the old man and his wife ate the fungus, it began growing on them and eventually took over their bodies, which is why when he left the crew, all they saw was a “grey sponge.” This grey sponge had to be the old man leaving and he essentially became this “sponge” because of the consumption of the fungus.