Hodgson had a proto-Lovecraftian penchant for buffeting his readers with unnamable, unclassifiable, inconceivable terrors—that’s to say, “Issues.” A number of of his tales make use of that very phrase to lend a direct ambiance of alien menace: “The Factor Invisible,” “The Actual Factor: ‘SOS’,” and “The Factor within the Weeds.”
In his landmark research of supernatural fiction, Danse Macabre, Stephen King reduces horror’s numerous specters to 5 broad archetypes, every represented by a basic literary exemplar: the Vampire, the Werewolf, the Ghost, the Haunted Place, and the Anonymous Factor.
It’s this remaining class—an alien, monster, mutant, demon, or in any other case inexplicable creature—that Hodgson would make peculiarly his personal. The Anonymous Factor is each one in every of horror’s oldest concepts and one in every of its most trendy. Dragons, sea serpents, demons, and different inhuman monsters have stalked mythology since antiquity, but nineteenth-century Gothic fiction largely involved itself with supernatural beings that mirrored humanity: ghosts who preserved reminiscence, vampires who embodied urge for food, and werewolves who dramatized the beast lurking inside civilized man.
Starting with writers corresponding to Mary Shelley and persevering with by way of H. G. Wells, Arthur Machen, Robert W. Chambers, and Hodgson, horror more and more turned outward, imagining entities whose terror lay not of their resemblance to humanity however of their utter indifference to it. These weren’t corrupted individuals however wholly alien types of life whose motives, anatomy, and even existence appeared to violate the identified order of nature.
This shift suited Hodgson significantly nicely. His years as a service provider seaman satisfied him that the oceans nonetheless hid immense areas of real thriller, the place the bounds of science and human expertise blurred into hypothesis. Many times his fiction exploits the ocean’s potential to cover inconceivable issues beneath an apparently empty horizon, making the ocean not merely a setting however an confederate to cosmic horror.
Lengthy earlier than Lovecraft peopled the deep with historical gods, Hodgson imagined huge, unknowable organisms lurking on this planet’s forgotten waters, creatures whose mere proximity steered that mankind occupied solely a tiny and unintended place inside creation.
In contrast to the shapeshifting Werewolf (e.g., Mr. Hyde, Dorian Grey, or the Invisible Man), which serves as a metaphor for humanity’s divided nature, or the parasitic Vampire (e.g., Dracula, Svengali, or Carmilla), who embodies predatory appetites—sexual, financial, or religious—the Anonymous Factor has no anthropic parallel. It isn’t a commentary on some recognizable human vice or situation, however one thing essentially abhuman—certainly, antihuman.
It’s the final Different: way more alien than conspiring foreigners (Fu Manchu), decadent elites (Dorian Grey), lecherous aristocrats (Dracula), or hypocritical gents (Dr. Jekyll), the Anonymous Factor possesses no significant human counterpart. It represents not corruption however incomprehensibility; not temptation however annihilation. It’s the emblem of desolation, oblivion, and infinity.
Such is “The Factor within the Weeds” — one of the vital visceral remaining bosses within the “Sargasso Sea Mythos,” one in every of Hodgson’s biggest successes at literary financial system, and one in every of his most well-known quick tales. Its revolting odor, maddening invisibility, inexplicable violence, and drunkenly chaotic destruction create an awesome impression of supernatural malignity earlier than its true nature is ever revealed. The result’s one in every of Hodgson’s most interesting demonstrations that terror usually relies upon much less upon what a monster is than upon how lengthy it stays unknown.
The yarn is introduced because the firsthand memory of a former third mate who remembers probably the most terrifying expertise of his profession at sea. Whereas crusing residence from the Cape, the ship is pushed unusually far west by opposite commerce winds, putting it in waters unfamiliar to the officers. One calm, starless night time, the narrator and the primary mate, Mr. Lammart, discover an inexplicable odor drifting throughout the deck.
The odor is “faint and sickly,” but unusually acquainted, changing into so overpowering that even the lookout confirms he’s “honest p’isoned with it.” The mate compares it to the dank reek of “a mighty outdated derelict” saturated with “century-old bilge-water and lifeless males an’ seaweed,” whereas the lookout jokingly means that “it is Davy Jones come up for a breather.”
As an unnatural fog settles across the vessel, the ambiance grows more and more oppressive. The ocean turns into unnaturally quiet, visibility shrinks to virtually nothing, and the narrator develops an unshakable premonition of hazard. Whereas standing on the rail, Mr. Lammart all of the sudden loses his cap as if one thing has struck it away. Each males hear an unseen object “fiddling away on the rail,” as if invisible fingers are feeling alongside the ship’s aspect.
When the narrator leaves briefly to retrieve a lamp, he hears the mate shout, adopted by violent crashes, gasping sounds, after which full silence. Returning with the sunshine, he discovers blood on the deck and rail, however the mate himself has vanished with out a hint.
The crew rushes aft, solely to expertise one other assault. As they collect with the lamp held excessive, one thing invisible darts from the darkness and smashes it to items. The narrator realizes with horror that they’re silhouetted towards the sunshine whereas “on the market within the darkness there absolutely lurked some factor of monstrousness.” He orders everybody under, satisfied that an infinite however unseen presence is hovering over the ship.
Captain Jeldy, woke up by the commotion, arms himself and the officers with revolvers earlier than main an investigation onto the fog-shrouded deck. They uncover blood the place the mate disappeared, however no physique.
Unusual sounds echo throughout the ship: ringbolts rattle as if unseen palms are testing them, heavy blows shake the deck, and one thing of large weight rolls throughout the planking. The officers repeatedly problem no matter is aboard, however obtain no reply.
Then disaster strikes. The sheep penned on deck start bleating frantically as invisible drive tears aside their enclosure, smashing it repeatedly towards the deck earlier than hurling each pen and animals overboard.
The narrator instinctively restrains Captain Jeldy from firing his revolver, satisfied that “it might be futile to assault with so ineffectual a factor as a puny revolver bullet.” With no higher possibility, the officers retreat under to await daylight, abandoning even the wheel and lookout.
At daybreak, the fog nonetheless surrounds the vessel till a contemporary breeze lastly tears it away. Solely then does the thriller develop into clear. The ship lies within the midst of an immense floating discipline of seaweed stretching for practically 1 / 4 mile in each route.
Wanting over the rail, Captain Jeldy progressively distinguishes what first seems to be merely one other patch of darker weed. Out of the blue he acknowledges it as an infinite dwelling creature and whispers in astonishment, “What a monster! … That is what bought the mate.”
The officers understand they’re a colossal squid in contrast to something identified to science. Its gigantic eyes stare expressionlessly upward whereas a number of large tentacles lie intertwined among the many weed beds. Satisfied it killed the mate, Captain Jeldy fires into the creature.
The ocean instantly erupts into chaos as “tons” of weed are thrown into the air by the beast’s thrashing limbs. The ship’s metal hull reverberates beneath large blows whereas the officers empty their revolvers into the boiling mass of tentacles, blood, weed, and seawater.
The battle rapidly escalates. The creature heaves itself partly from the water, inflicting the vessel to listing below its immense weight. Three monstrous tentacles sweep aboard and coil across the mainmast “with such hideous violence” that all the rigging visibly shakes. The officers understand the squid is highly effective sufficient to tear down the mast and even crush the ship’s hull. Impressed by desperation, the narrator remembers the ship’s “blasting cartridges” (viz., dynamite).
Captain Jeldy cuts the fuse quick, calmly waits till the final potential immediate, and throws the explosive into the ocean beside the creature. The explosion proves devastating. The squid appears to break down immediately, its tentacles slackening earlier than sliding lifelessly again overboard as the large physique sinks beneath the weed.
Surveying the harm, the officers uncover that the shattered skylight of the sail-locker hid the true destiny of Mr. Lammart. Moderately than being dragged into the ocean, he had been hurled by way of the skylight onto a mound of spare sails, which cushioned his fall and left him unconscious.
A severed tip of 1 tentacle nonetheless clings tightly round his wrist, whereas cuts on his hand counsel he had slashed himself free with the sheath knife he habitually carried. Other than his accidents and shock, he survives the encounter.
Because the ship lastly clears the weed discipline and resumes her voyage, the narrator and Captain Jeldy watch astern from the taffrail. There, rising silently from the guts of the weed, they glimpse one other lengthy, tapering appendage curling above the floor earlier than disappearing as soon as extra.
The narrator closes by evaluating the hidden predator to “a veritable spider of the deep, ready within the nice internet that Dame Nature had spun for it within the eddy of her tides and currents,” leaving the unsettling suggestion that the slain squid was not alone, and that such monstrous creatures nonetheless hang-out the lonely reaches of the ocean.
The “Factor” on this story doesn’t differ vastly from nearly all of Hodgson’s seafaring beasts. Just like the sharks, ship’s rats, sea caterpillars, ravenous octopi, acidic molds, and parasitic fungi that menace so a lot of his stranded mariners, the squid possesses nothing overtly supernatural, but it stays a potent supply of horror.
Certainly, by establishing an environment of unmistakable supernatural dread solely to dismantle it within the story’s climax, Hodgson seems to be making a subtler—and maybe extra unsettling—level concerning the pure world itself: that it’s no much less terrifying than ghosts, sea-devils, or elemental spirits.
The one comfort obtainable to humanity is that these brokers of Nature stay topic to Nature’s personal legal guidelines. A squid may be harpooned, dynamited, or just prevented. However, as Hodgson quietly reminds us, this presents scant consolation to the sailor who all of the sudden feels a tentacle curl round his ankle and drag him over the bulwark of a becalmed ship at midnight.
Probably the most revealing passages within the story—a sentence that illuminates a lot of Hodgson’s horror fiction—comes within the narrator’s remaining glimpse of the weed discipline:
“As we stood and seemed one thing wavered up out of the guts of the weed—a protracted, tapering, sinous factor, that curled and wavered towards the dawn-light, and presently sank again once more into the demure weed—a veritable spider of the deep, ready within the nice internet that Dame Nature had spun for it within the eddy of her tides and currents.”
The picture is profoundly revealing. The monster is not an inexplicable invader from some supernatural dimension however a affected person predator completely tailored to its setting. The weed discipline is reworked right into a colossal spider’s internet, not woven by malice or witchcraft however by tides, currents, and evolution itself.
The true architect of the horror is neither demon nor sorcerer, however Dame Nature, whose detached processes have produced a creature each bit as terrifying as any mythological leviathan. The ultimate picture subsequently refuses the reassurance that normally accompanies a rational rationalization. The squid is recognized, however it’s not diminished. If something, the revelation makes the universe really feel nonetheless extra hostile by suggesting that such monstrosities are usually not violations of the pure order—they’re merchandise of it.
This can be a cursed sea certainly, however it’s cursed by the completely flesh-and-blood freaks of pure evolution quite than by supernatural enchantment. On this respect Hodgson stands alongside contemporaries corresponding to H. G. Wells and, to a lesser extent, Jules Verne, whose fiction repeatedly reminds readers that science and nature can evoke as a lot awe and terror as folklore ever might.
Ghosts could belong to legend, however the deep ocean harbors actual organisms scarcely much less astonishing. Hodgson’s genius lies in recognizing that the unknown needn’t be supernatural to be elegant, and that Nature’s personal “spellbook”—written in adaptation, predation, and unfathomable antiquity—incorporates horrors way more enduring than something present in a wizard’s grimoire.
