The Feast: A Ghostly Guide to Possession
By Christopher Valenzuela
First Place Winner, Bow & Chariot 2025 Horror Story Challenge
Subgenre: Body Horror
TW: References to Eating Disorders
The easiest way to possess someone is to enter into them directly.
If you have the time and the patience for it, try to convince a living soul to enter into a pact with you. This would ensure that there are no … hiccups along the way. However, this is a lengthy process and only yields a fruitful result about sixty percent of the time. You should not underestimate the fickleness of the living condition.
Therefore, the best way to possess someone is to enter while they are feeding. Humans especially, whether for good or bad, indulge in their cuisine. They open themselves up to the experience of consuming something delicious. It fills them, warms them, cools them, calms them, entices them. They give themselves up in ways that they never would otherwise. They are not thinking to themselves that they want to do this, but instead it is innate. It is built into them.
As a spirit, it is easy to take yourself apart because there are fewer seams to rip in the noncorporeal form. This limits the sensation of being consumed whole if you allow yourself to be taken in bite by bite. Being consumed whole will bring forth a terror in your essence not unlike falling through the endless void. A weightless dread of endless nothingness for all eternity. There is a chance this sense of terror will never leave, even after the possession. So, take head, dear reader. As for the subject, I am unsure what it tastes like to swallow a soul, to feel something between life and death on the tastebuds, but it must not taste too terribly. Perhaps it is sweet, full of the life lived before. Or perhaps it is savory, filled with the umami of existence and the earthiness of being bound to this world still. Then again, perhaps it is nothing more than an extra layer somewhere on the palette that is undefinable.
At first your new body will feel restrictive. It will feel cramped and agitating because you are an animal caged after so long running in the wild. You will feel the itch to break yourself free of this prison, to scratch open the flesh and let the bones drink in the fresh air. This feeling will pass shortly. Wait it out.
Once settled inside, it is important to not move too quickly. An overeager possession can have negative consequences. Imagine the living as if they are jack-o-lanterns and life itself is the flame that burns inside of them. It has an expiration date, but it is still a warm, guiding light. As you well know, the afterlife is not quite cold, but it is chilled. Possession offers you a taste of warmth once more. For some spirits, this is intoxicating and causes them to move too quickly. If you too eagerly try to take over once inside, the light can go out. A soft wind will flicker; a gust will devour. Keep this in mind.
The easiest thing to overlook when possessing a living creature is the need for food. As spirits we can go long periods without eating, we do not crave nor need sustenance in such a similar way. We are beyond that. However, starving your vessel is not recommended as this can lead to many system failures including, but not limited to, loss of energy and loss of hair. Some subjects did see a boost in positive self imagery with starvation. However, this may just be a design flaw with humans.
Food itself is not what will bring forth the ecstasy of this experience. No, no, no. It is the feeling of fullness that is reached when you eat. The sense of life that is brought into the body as nutrients find their way into the cells and bloodstream. As a spirit, you have forgotten the needs of the flesh, but the body remains in want and in need. You will experience all the scores that it keeps when you take control of someone, especially a human.
You see, I was not lying when I said that eating will open a human up in ways unexpected. There are certain intoxications that come from consuming food. Let the sweetly-salty taste of blood fill your mouth as you chew the meat of an animal. Feel the power from ripping apart another being. The weight of holding precious life in between your teeth as it slathers its way across the tongue. It is carnal and rageful and uninhibited. Ecstasy cannot come close to describing the euphoria reached by experiencing this again. There is no better example of what life must taste like than to bite into a perfectly cooked medium rare steak.
Search for the exactness of what umami defines. Find it in the heaviness of the perfect mac and cheese as it slides down the throat. Feel the weight of it all bubble in that chamber. That ache is there to remind you that this is life. Let the mixture become the perfect acid bath inside of the stomach. Feel it gurgle and garble as you continue to feel the sweatiness of crunchy, crispy, country fried chicken. Grind the bones between your teeth and feel the sharpness as you slurp back the juices that once gave life and now fuel this borrowed one. The sound of sizzling sausages is like the angels singing on high. The fats drip off of them, oiling up so that each bite is punching back. Your fingers should be covered, coated, crusted by the time the first phase is devoured. The niceties of polite society do not contain you. Eat with the ferality that is the human condition.
Taste a fresh strawberry as it is ripped from the vine, ripe with that sweet sugary flavor and just a hint of sourness at the tail end. The refreshing juice of honeydew as it spills out onto the skin. Its sticky, tacky feeling as it dries on your lips and chin. The sweetness of a cupcake as the frosting delicately eats away at the teeth inside your mouth, coating them as it spreads its sickly sweet confectionary sugar around. Feel each pang of the joyous decay that comes with feasting. Allow the body to open itself to every taste it comes into contact with.
Feel the fullness in your belly. The protruding roundness of filling yourself with life and nutrients. The food breaking down, sloshing inside of you. It should hurt like the pain from a workout. The sweet release of what was and what will become. It is the weight of the harvest and the bounty of your spoils. Let it fill you beyond the brim.
You see, the idea isn’t so much to be a malignant force inside of your vessel, although a parasite will always be a parasite no matter how you try to spin it, but rather to allow both of you to experience life at its highest order.
That being said, there is no such thing as a soft exit from a possession. Ripping a soul out of a body is much, much harder than letting one in. It is visceral and painful. The living cannot always let go of things as easily as the dead.
When the body is ready, it will begin to reject you. You will feel yourself beginning to rise up through the chest and linger in the back of the throat. It is important to expunge yourself carefully. A fast exit can cause parts of the living’s soul to come with you. You do not want that. You do not want to be saddled and burdened with the soul of someone still living.
Reach back into the depths of the mouth with your physical hand, feel your way around until you touch the edges of your own soul, and coax yourself out. A soft beckoning motion with the fingers as if you are a feral cat being guided out of the shadows. It will feel like you are being birthed in the most grotesque manner as you crawl your way out through the throat, fill their mouth up, and cover their tongue once again. Gift them the pungent and earthy flavor of death, remorse, sorrow.
It is common for the living to cry during the excavation process. It is painful to experience death without dying, even at a microlevel. Fear not. You can return to the same subject multiple times. However, prolonged and consistent exposure to possession in this manner will cause the light of their life to dim faster. With the right balance, you may be able to keep this process going for years. With the wrong process you may end up experiencing death a second time.
