John uses a spell to become a young black woman af
John uses a spell to become a young black woman after he finds out he’s dying of cancer
The diagnosis hung over John like a guillotine, its blade the slow, agonizing drip of his remaining time. Terminal pancreatic cancer. Six months, the doctor had said, maybe less. Faced with oblivion, John, a man who’d lived a life of quiet desperation, stumbled upon a grimoire tucked away in his late grandfather’s dusty attic. Its leather cover promised power, a way to cheat death, if only for a little while. A ritual, it claimed, to shift one’s essence, to inhabit another form.
The spell called for a sacrifice, a shedding of the self. John, desperate, didn’t hesitate. He chose to become young, vibrant; a stark contrast to his decaying body. He pictured Anika, a beautiful Black woman whose picture he’d seen in a magazine – her laughter, her strength, a life he’d never known. He poured his life essence, his very being, into the ritual, the air thick with the scent of incense and something ancient, something wrong.
The transformation was jarring. His body twisted, bones cracking and reforming, skin shifting and changing color. He vomited bile and agony, a guttural scream trapped in his throat as his familiar features melted away. When the convulsions finally ceased, he was Anika. Or, at least, he looked like her. The smooth, dark skin, the captivating eyes, the flowing hair – it was perfect mimicry.
But the horror didn’t end there. John, inhabiting Anika’s form, felt a creeping unease. Her memories weren’t his. They were hers, flooding his consciousness, a jarring tapestry of joy and trauma he couldn’t reconcile with his own life. Worse still, he found himself drawn to places, people, he shouldn’t know, a chilling familiarity with the hidden corners of Anika’s life that felt deeply intrusive. He found himself reacting to things in a way he knew was not his own – feelings of fear, deep seated resentment and a strange attraction to violent imagery. He started to feel his own malevolent presence twisting Anika’s essence.
He started seeing things. Shadows danced in his peripheral vision, things that seemed human, but were not quite right. Whispers slithered in his ears, promising power, echoing with the malevolent undertones of the grimoire. He saw glimpses of faces morphing, twisting – the faces of those he had used, those who had fueled his dark ritual. The fear intensified. He felt the dark magic corrupting him, twisting Anika’s personality to reflect the malevolence he’d always suppressed within his own form. He wasn’t Anika anymore. He was something else entirely. Something dark, parasitic, feeding off her life force. He was the ultimate predator, masquerading as his prey.
One night, he woke to find himself standing before a mirror. But it wasn’t Anika’s face staring back. Her eyes, once bright, were now shadowed and filled with a horrifying emptiness. And behind those eyes, he saw a fleeting glimpse of his own face, decaying, a grotesque reminder of the malignancy that consumed both his former self, and now her. The reflection smiled, a cruel, chilling grin that sent shivers down his – or rather, her – spine. His escape from death had become a terrifying, eternal imprisonment, a parasitic existence feeding on stolen life, forever bound to the horror he had unleashed. The spell had granted him life, but at the cost of his soul, and Anika’s.
