"The Voice in the Night" is a short story by English writer William Hope Hodgson, first published in the November 1907 edition of Blue Book 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) ISBN 0848819853 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.
After 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.
Doug Wheeler adapted the concept for his run on DC Comics' Swamp Thing, even naming the main villain Matango.
The story ends ominously as wood from the town has been harvested for use in homes across England, and the narrator has inhaled spores from the strange fungi.
The concept of fungal symbiosis or assimilation of humans is also frequently found in the work of Jeff VanderMeer, especially in his "Ambergris" novels and short stories.
The same concept is used in the video game The Last of Us, in which a mutant species of Cordyceps ravages the United States, transforming the majority of those it infects into mindless fungal zombies.