By this point, I was sure I was dreaming, or having a really bad hallucination, or something like that. Haruhi and I were walking into what looked like a giant city of spirals- well, what looked like a city. All around us were enormous drill-like buildings stretching up into the sky, some bigger than the others, and some that had drills growing off of drills, like some weird tree. And of course, the giant globe in the centre.

I'm pretty sure Freud said that dreams are some sort of gateway into the subconscious, that they reveal your innermost thoughts and desires. Well, Freud, if you're hearing me somehow, I'd love to hear what you have to say about my subconscious.

Well, we had nowhere else to go, so I just decided to grit my teeth and take a look at what the giant globe looked like up-close. Grasping the still-non-responsive Haruhi's hand, I started to make my way down the side of the crater and into the centre. It was then that the spirals started to shine, an almost alien glow coming over them. Well, I say almost alien. As if a bunch of giant, natural-looking spiral structures could be earthly in any way.

The glow radiated all around, and I suddenly began to notice the odd stone patterns that made up the ground. The patterns had started off being wavy and cylindrical, like snakes, but now I noticed that they were starting to thin out, and there were points where they crossed over and over, like a double helix.

A second later, I saw the eye staring up from beneath the lines.

I shuddered when I saw it, which is probably the appropriate reaction to a blank, lifeless, grey stone eye glaring up from the ground. My noticing this then led me to notice several other eyes, then the faces they were attached to, all staring up from beneath my feet. I have to admit that I panicked a little, shuffling my feet so I wasn't standing on any, and dragging Haruhi around so that she wasn't, either. I soon calmed down and realised that they were made of stone and therefore unable to move, or feel anything.

My first thoughts were that the faces had been built by whatever built the spirals, but then I noted the creases and wrinkles in every face, the perfect proportions, the natural-looking features, and I realised that they couldn't possibly have been sculpted, unless one of the Celestials was some kind of Michelangelo. The faces were just staring, staring, staring...and it took me a minute before I could realise what they were staring at- the giant globe in the centre. The faces just lay on the ground, lit up every time the globe glowed. It was as if they were completely transfixed by it.

As I walked further down towards the centre of the crater with Haruhi, I realised that the faces were getting greyer and greyer, more and more like rock and stone. On the outer edges, they had been smoother and more natural in appearance, but towards the centre they were rougher and harder, as if the spirals had drained all of the life from them, leaving a bunch of what were basically rocks that looked like a total amateur had sculpted them.

As we came to the centre of the crater, I'm embarrassed to admit that I began clinging to Haruhi's hand with a tighter grip. I was just starting to realise it, but whenever we got into a totally alien situation, it was her enthusiasm and wonder that provided the foil I needed for my calm and laid-back nature. With that gone, I...almost had no one to panic for me, if that makes any sense.

I guess Haruhi's condition did have the one upside- she wasn't dragging me along with her to explore this new world, as she'd tried to do when it was just us two locked in Closed Space. Of course, back then we got home safely in the end, but had she been in that mood here...I'm not so sure. Anyway, enough of this sentimentality.

Eventually, we had come to the centre of the crater and were standing directly under the globe. I noticed that it wasn't just a giant sphere balancing upright on the floor, but it was being supported by several thick vines that crossed over each other, forming a tree-trunk pattern. Things were just getting weirder and weirder. I could see structures around me that were like conventional shapes, yet I could also see those that spiralled (of course) into shapes I'd never seen before, into things that looked like trees and bushes...

"You...it's been a while...since I saw people..."

I jumped. Well, I was standing in the middle of a city of spirals, looking around cautiously in case of any surprise attacks or other irrational things like that. I think I had the right to be a little on-edge.

The voice came from the left of where we were standing. Slowly, I moved my head and saw a young girl- well, a girl around our age- leaning upright on the wall, her arms wrapped around what looked like a stone statue of a boy with glasses. A second later, I noticed that her arms were indeed wrapped around him- they had stretched to an impossible length and were entwined with his own, stone, arms.

"You seem pretty shocked...I guess that's normal, though." The girl said, smiling slightly. It was a sad smile, and I started to feel a little awkward.

"Well, yeah, I mean...it's a long story. But I never expected to see another person in here along with us two." I intentionally excluded Koizumi from the label of "person". "How did you get here? Do you know Haruhi?"

I indicated to Haruhi, who was beginning to look around a little. At least she was starting to get a little bit of life back. The girl looked at her, then shook her head. It seemed as though it was hurting her neck to turn to us, so I moved in front of her.

"No, I don't know her...and as for how I got here, it's a long story. Well, maybe not so long, but...a disturbing one. I think we've got enough time for me to tell it, if you'd care to hear it."

I was a little hesitant to trust her, but I then remembered that this was where Koizumi had told us to go, so we had nothing better to do. Then again, Koizumi hadn't mentioned the mass influx of spirals.

Her story was truly bizarre and, as she had said, disturbing. She gave her name as being Kirie Goshima, and apparently she used to live in a town called "Kurouzu-cho", which became possessed by- you've probably guessed it- the spiral. She said that she was intentionally leaving out the more gruesome elements, but she mentioned something about her friend's hair suddenly growing in spiral patterns (followed by her own), and described the transformations of people in snails, with giant spiral shells on their backs.

Over time, she explained, the people of the town were slowly killed off or driven insane by the curse of the spiral. Escape was impossible, due to every road leading out of the town spiralling back in, and eventually her and her boyfriend (Who she introduced as "Shuichi", the guy she was locked in an embrace with) made their way into the centre of the town and followed a spiral staircase down to a colossal city of spirals- the very one we were standing in.

"Shuichi...he was attacked by someone on the staircase and fell all the way down here. You've seen the ground, haven't you? Every person there here is a person swallowed by the spiral. They just lie here, frozen, staring at that thing. Captivated." She said. Suddenly, something occurred to me.

"Miss Goshima...wait. If you took a staircase under your town to get to this city of spirals...then why are they here now, in a pocket dimension co-created by this girl here?" I nodded to Haruhi. Kirie paused for a moment and stared down at the ground. A few seconds later, she turned back to me, the sad smile back on her face.

"Then she was the co-creator of this world..." She nodded, then carried on. "This...this city...it wasn't underneath the town at all. It was all around it. We just entered...I guess you could call it a gateway. The spiral is enigmatic, it captivates the souls of people...that's why they used it..."

"Who?"

She was reluctant to answer this. Nonetheless, I persevered, and she eventually broke her silence.

"The Outer Ones."