A Man in a Woman's Body: The Story of a Habentem #Wattys2016 #JustWriteIt

Chapter 2 - In over your head

Later when I got home with the grimoire I took out my old laptop and hooked it up to my phone to use some of the meagher amount of data I could afford. I tried to search some keywords from the grimoire to see if I could find whom it belonged to. I couldn't find anything about the book. In reading the book, I learnt the tale of a man who had reportedly been visited by a spirit who called itself a Habentem and told him it could teach him to possess another's body. The man who wrote this journal had been a cripple and took up this spirits offer to teach him to gain a functional body on the condition that he would not be harming anyone else.

The spirit then described the following explanation of how to take another's body. First focus on the sensations of every part of the physical body then prise the spiritual essence from the physical body by squeezing it into itself and drawing it up through the body into the mind. This is done by imagining a ghostly representation of yourself shrinking up inside you and gathering into a smaller apparition of yourself in behind your forehead. As you're doing this there will be a cold tingling sensation all over the body where the essence is separated from the body, this will be like chewing ice and chilli peppers at the same time. Then there will be a pleasant warm feeling in the region where the essence is gathered up. This will mean that the transference is ready, so you must then choose to either send your whole essence or a part of it and prepare that for travel whilst setting up the physical link to the host or stasis reliquary. Then use the same process you used on yourself to make full conscious awareness of the host's body and essence. When you then gather up their essence they may experience a cold shiver and they may also begin to smell the sulphuric smell of rotten eggs. Next gather up the hosts essence or part of it and trap it in a swirling cage of projected red energy this will allow you to make space in the host for the part of your essence. Then drive the piece of your essence out of your forehead and down your body to wherever the physical link is between you and the host. Send the essence into their forehead or into the heart of the stone in the case of a stasis reliquary. Finally seal the transference by closing the caged portion of the host into your body by dragging it from the host through the physical link and binding it to its new home with a cloud of blue swirling projected energy. During the transmission or swap the host may convulse and will invariably suffer tremendous shock when they realise they are not in their own body. In the case of partial possession where the hosts essence is just pushed aside in their own body to make way for the new part of your essence then the partially possessed host may not notice the transference as anything more than a cold shiver and a brief foul odour. Before making the switch a thorough study of the host is recommended as the voice and mannerisms used in the new body will be similar but different to that of the old body unless great care is taken.

The man in the journal knew of a woman in a coma at a neighbor's house and set out to visit the neighbour under the ruse of offering give well wishes and support. The man described in detail how he first used the crystal set into the cover of this book to take the power from the Habentem and use that power to jump into the woman's body. The man only partially achieved the transition because the woman had not given consent for him to take full possession. The man found himself separated into two joined consciousnesses and unable to rouse the woman's body from the coma. At first the man became disgruntled with the Habentem for having him now in a state of half consciousness and also being half trapped in a comatose body. So he took the crystal and slide it into the underside of his mattress, intending for it to be lost to everyone and forgotten forever.

Months later the man was able to rouse the woman from her comatose state enough that they could speak to each other without words inside her mind. She did not show any physical recovery in her body but with the little consciousness she had left in her dying mind she allowed the man to take full possession. This resulted in a body swap where the woman went into the man's body and shortly afterwards died because she just stopped breathing. The man then went on to described his other uses of the Habentem's gift throughout the rest of his life in the woman's body, I skimmed through many page loosing interest in the story, but I flicked to the end of the journal and read that the man lived up until a ripe old age when she buried the book on the mountain top as the Habentem had requested. That is where I later found the book. I now wondered whether the Habentem had been communicating to me through my dreams.