It is the Communion wafer used in Christian sacrament, a small white disc. As explained in this Wikipedia article, the word derives from the Latin hostia (defined by Wiktionary as sacrifice, offering or victim).
In Holy Communion (more specifically the Eucharist), deriving from the account of the Last Supper, the host represents the body of Jesus Christ, and red wine represents his blood. (The wafer takes the place of the bread described at the Last Supper.) It is argued (for example, see The Catholic Encyclopedia) that through transubstantiation these symbols actually become Christ’s body and blood. The celebrant (priest) administers a wafer and a sip of wine to each worshipper, in this ceremony of Communion.
Given the morbid and apprehensive tone of your extract, I wonder whether it is from a vampire story. Stuffing vampires’ mouths with Eucharistic wafers has been one traditional way of killing them–sensibly enough, on the same basis as crucifixes and holy water.
Kerry Clare discusses this in the article ‘How to Kill a Vampire: Crucifixes, Holy Water and Other Sacred Objects’:
As Montague Summers describes in The Vampire, His Kith and Kin,
wafers have been found in the tombs of saints such as St. Basil, St.
Othman and St. Cuthbert, and even modern-day Greeks were known to
place one between the lips of the dead at burial, as protection
against vampirism.
[...]
Despite [dramatic weaponised use of the wafer in Dracula, and in Coppola’s film adaptation], the sacred wafer
defence never really caught on in popular culture as much as the cross
or crucifix, probably because that’s a much more dramatic and
recognizable prop. Plus, the Eucharist was in many ways replaced by
the use of another Christian sacramental: holy water.
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