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As the Spiral, Michael was far from anything resembling human.
It had...memories of being human, maybe. Of a life with one identity and one set of features and one voice and--a life where it was he, and he was whole. It wasn't that anymore, wasn't Michael Shelley anymore.
It had his face, sure. Maybe some parts of his personality still, it wasn't too sure about that. But it wasn't him. Couldn't be. It was a part of the Spiral, and the Spiral couldn't be one thing long enough to be a he, a who, only an it.
So Michael was Michael, in a sense, though no longer Michael Shelley. It was convenient to have a name sometimes. Michael was as good a name as any.
This Michael was constantly twisting and untwisting, changing so rapidly it almost ached even when hardly anything about it seemed visibly wrong.
Except for inside the corridors, of course. Inside the corridors, where it didn't have to bother looking like Michael Shelley to better watch the people it could potentially entertain itself with, the twisting didn't feel quite so...uncomfortable. It could still feel the churning inside of itself every time a corridor disappeared or moved, every time a door was opened, could still feel a buzzing behind its eyes when someone questioned their own reality. It was just, in the corridors, unbound by any construct of physics or reality, it felt like home.
Michael preferred the corridors to the world outside, generally speaking. Things were simpler when it didn't have to worry about things as asinine as having a face that didn't send people running, or staying in places crowded or empty enough that nobody noticed that its shadow was all wrong and its reflection showed something closer to itself than to Michael Shelley. Though sometimes it was rather fun to see the moment a human realized that the thing they thought was one of them was far from it. It typically had to take those humans into the corridors to keep them from making too much noise. That was fun too, waiting for the human to realize an entrance was only that, that an exit didn't exist.
Sometimes it liked to wager with itself, guess how long it would take for one of them to be consumed entirely. The longest was a year. Michael would respect their resilience if their resilience didn't make it more difficult to lure others in. Too much of a chance of one meeting the other and keeping each other sane if Michael didn't monitor them. Stability, and sanity in turn, was the antithesis to the corridors.
It kept things interesting, usually. Interesting enough that the Spiral didn't bother with the affairs of others at least, generally speaking. There were exceptions, of course.
It would rather not see the other rituals completed. A world governed by the rules of another would be tiresome. The rules of the current world were rather tiresome already even though they were so easily bent, and Michael knew some of the others would make their own rules much more rigid. That wouldn't do. It did interfere occasionally then. It wasn't going to sacrifice its fun for the sake of an alliance.
So it had its fun, and it didn't speak to others when it was unnecessary. It made a home in its corridors, in itself, where it saw in fractals and shifted endlessly, spiralling in and out of existence so rapidly that any other being would be ripped to shreds. It had a voice that made humans’ heads ache, a laugh that induced vertigo, a face that gave people chills even when they couldn't actually put a finger on what was wrong.
Michael was almost entirely Spiral, hardly a trace of humanity left in it, and it thought that maybe it preferred that. From what it remembered, humanity and identity and stability were tiring. Yes, this was better. Michael enjoyed its time as the Spiral, enjoyed being absolutely nothing but itself.
Helen was…different. At least a bit. Michael, too, believed that it was still he at first. Helen was more stubborn though.
Michael Shelley was a weak-willed man, and then he was a weak-willed monster. He lost his identity quickly, and he became it with hardly any struggle. Almost as soon as he entered the corridors, felt them twisting and shifting inside his body, felt the body of the Spiral hidden behind Michael Shelley's skin, it accepted monstrosity as its reality.
Helen nearly did the same. She felt the twisting, felt that the appearance of Helen Richardson’s body was a lie, felt the corridors and the remnants of Michael, and she nearly gave in even quicker than he did.
But then she didn't.
She found those last vestiges of Helen Richardson still trapped in the Spiral's center, and she clung to them. Sometimes she thought it was half just to prove a point, to avoid becoming what the humans she knew already thought she was. Giving in, allowing herself to become itself, would certainly be easier. She would probably enjoy it, truthfully. Michael certainly seemed to. Still, she remained she, and she remained something resembling Helen Richardson.
She was closer to it sometimes. She would admit that. She still had to...eat. To feed the Spiral. She didn't feel guilty about it, per se. She just thought it was distasteful. She didn't enjoy the feeling of someone wandering the corridors quite as much as Michael. She still tricked people into them though. The Spiral got restless if she didn't, and the twisting turned into grating, and that was much less comfortable than some poor fool trapped in the corridors.
She still preferred inside the corridors to outside. That was probably just inherent to the Spiral, she thought. It was easier for her to exist inside its corridors where the rules of the physical world were nonexistent, even if it was harder in the corridors to remain her rather than it. When she spent any significant amount of time in the corridors, it was the closest she came to fully falling into monstrosity, so she made sure to visit the outside often. Inside the corridors was...nice, though. The shifting eased, her limbs could elongate and crack without struggling to also uphold an image of Helen Richardson, the fractals in her vision helped her navigate instead of just making her dizzy.
She was...undeniably less Spiral than Michael had been before her. She sometimes thought that might not necessarily be a good thing, but then she looked into Michael’s memories and decided she’d much rather run the risk of untwisting enough that the Spiral would decide it needed a new person to take her place as an illusion of a face, someone weaker than her who would fall into its habits with ease. She knew it would come one day. Still.
Michael’s time as the Spiral overtook him completely, until he was nothing but the monster he’d been fed to. He accepted monstrosity, accepted that he would be it from then on, and it grew to enjoy its monstrosity, even. Helen’s time as the Spiral made her less afraid, gave her a hunger for chaos and terror she’d never known before, made her learn to fight just to hold onto even her own voice, fight for any last trace of stability.
Helen fought. Michael didn’t. Helen couldn’t properly serve the Spiral, twisting and ever-changing as it was, not in the way Michael could. He was malleable, soft, could be whatever the Spiral desired. Helen was firm, determined, not nearly so eager to please and willing to serve.
Helen was still oh-so-human much of the time, and whatever part of her was still the terrified real estate agent that walked through a door that shouldn’t exist feared that could lead her to her end.