Martin Manor (3)

Roddick was startled and overjoyed as the icy stiffness gradually left his body. He hurriedly flexed his fingers, wrists, forearms, upper arms... Feeling sensation return, he rolled over and scrambled out of bed.

The light was dim, but Roddick had Spirit Sight, so it did not hinder his view of the room.

It was indeed a decaying, dilapidated hospital ward. Two beds stood on either side, but Roddick had not seen them before because only his eyes had been able to move. Now that he noticed them, he sucked in a cold breath. Each bed held a horrifying, contorted corpse, dried out and black-skinned like cured meat. Worse, the corpses did not seem quite dead. At the sound of Roddick moving, their necks began to turn with rusty creaks, as though they were about to twist themselves apart.

Both corpses' eyes snapped open, revealing nothing but whites. In the dim room, the sight sent a deeper chill down his spine.

The footsteps outside the door grew louder, too. Whoever was there seemed about to reach it.

Roddick's heart hammered. Already terrified, he glanced down by chance and saw, to his horror, that his hands had become stark white bones!

He had been so tense that he had not noticed the change in his body. The sudden sight of his skeletal hands nearly made him faint.

"What's going on? Damn it, what happened to me? Is this what the Dream Curse does? Did it turn me into a skeleton without my even noticing?" Panic-stricken, Roddick dropped onto his backside. Inside his trousers, his legs had become bones as well, stark white and stripped of every trace of flesh.

The sight gave him another fright, but this time he had some resistance to the shock. Though his hands and feet were skeletal,