The fusion didn't hurt. In fact, the burning sensation was completely gone. It felt…comfortable, despite my total lack of fingers. The box's cardboard looking surface had pretty much morphed into genuine looking skin and blended in perfectly with my own. Except it was very noticeable. And it was still breathing and glowing. If we were going to actually BECOME conjoined twins, I would have maybe preferred that my body ABSORBED it fully, instead of it just kinda looking like a box is fused with my arm. Or at least I would have liked to know ahead of time so I could have maybe told it where to latch on to me. I wouldn't mind having a fleshy box-lump jutting out of my shoulder, for example. I could have drawn a face on it, and wrapped a little shirt around it so it looked like I was giving a little friend a ride all the time. Patrick would have probably been jealous, though. Shit, speaking of, Patrick CAN'T be jealous of anything…he's destroyed. His mouth is gone. He's…dead. In his place was a twisted mound of who-knows-what. The area where the box fused with my hand resembles the surface of a far-away planet forged entirely from mucus. It looks almost like someone sloppily decorated my arm with skin-frosting. Flaps of the arm skin are overlapping small pieces of the misshapen box, and vice versa. "Well", I thought, "if I ever wanted to be a newt, this is one step closer. My fingers aren't webbed, but my whole hand is. I'll work on it."
So despite my failed attempt at suicide, I still needed to get the fuck out of here, so I descended the stairwell in complete darkness, with the exception of the beams of light that were still wildly leaking out of my arm. I guessed that I could possibly use my arm as a flashlight now and at least not trip on the way down. After all, I wouldn't want to kill myself UNWILLINGLY.
My new arm did a good job illuminating my way down the flight of stairs, as long as I didn't get distracted by the walls, which looked absolutely stunning when the light shined on them. The colors in here were different than the hallway upstairs. The walls were glowing with a pearlescent, dark purple, flaked with gold blisters that were heaving in and out. And the vines were back, too, coming from every direction, hugging themselves around the railings and independently exploring the surface of the walls. They looked like a collection of tubifex worms hunting blindly for some bacteria to snack on. With the box acting like a spotlight, rather than lighting up the whole room like earlier, I could only see parts of the walls and the staircase at a time as I passed them. The rest of the shaft was still enveloped in darkness.
I made it safely down a flight and a half of stairs before I saw them waiting for me. Shitshitshitshit. I stopped midway through the last set of stairs and aimed my arm downward just to make sure. Yup. There was a mob of those things down at the bottom, staring up at me and basically using their animated eyes and their extra appendages to dare me to come down there. I lost myself in the moment, briefly, as I looked into the huge vacant eyes of a giant triangular grinning pumpkin-head with two additional stumpy little arms poking out of the sides of it, attached to a little girls body that was gripping veiny, flesh-colored balloons. Though her face was frightening, the body was recognizable. "Ripley?" I said, quietly to no one in particular. I almost felt calmed because of our trust, but regardless if it WAS Ripley or not, my calmness was shattered as I shifted my weight toward her direction and one of her balloons screeched like an epileptic vulture and exploded, letting loose thousands of…liquid bees is the only way I can describe them. The buzzing was the noise of a thousand bees. But the wet yellow mercury that swarmed toward me was definitely not….