Unwritten

This Is Your Home: Ida Jean Gallagher

Ida Jean had never been a good runner.

She hadn't been good at any athletic activity—soccer, dance, tennis—but running in particular obliterated Ida Jean. The problem was that, upon first embarking on a mile-long jog, Ida Jean would believe herself capable of completing that mile coolly and with poise. The first thirty seconds would pass, and Ida Jean's heart would pump at a steady pace. Her legs, thin but sturdy, would carry her across the road; her vision would focus, and the world around her would hum with energy. This is good, Ida Jean would think, power coursing through her body. This feels good.

Then those thirty seconds would end, and Ida Jean would deteriorate. The breath that had come so easily would thin, her windpipe seeming to narrow with every step she took. Now her vision would blur, and the world around her would feel fuzzy and indistinct. Her legs would tighten, suddenly brittle and frail. She would forge onward, struggling for the same air that had flowed through her lungs only a minute prior. She had felt so powerful before; how could she have lost that feeling? Why couldn't she return to the exuberant way she'd been? Even as the taste of blood filled her mouth, even as the mucus coated her throat and her head spun, she would wonder what had gone wrong.

She'd told innumerable people about how she felt when she ran. "Yes," they would say, "you tire after the first minute or so. You're switching from short-term energy stores to long-term. But," they would add, "you're not supposed to feel like that." Your throat doesn't get congested, they would explain. You don't taste blood. You don't reach the mile marker and stumble, sure you're about to vomit your insides onto the pavement. Forget about a runners' high—Ida Jean had discovered runners' low, and it was hell on Earth.

Being at Ariston's Resort, Ida Jean learned, was something like running.

The morning after the massive thunderstorm, Ida Jean's cell phone stopped working. The applications were still operational, as were the photos and the camera function, but her cell service didn't register on the phone. Though the connection had hovered around three bars of Sprint 3G for the entire stay, nothing was coming through, not even 1x, the base indicator that one's phone was in America. The wifi too had disappeared. Ariston's website had ensured constant free wifi, no password necessary, but Ida Jean's phone displayed no wifi networks nearby. Even her next-door neighbors' wifi, a personal hotspot called "Jeremy's iPhone" that always seemed to be active, had vanished. Restarting her cell phone did nothing, as did calling the front desk for assistance via her room's landline—the dial tone blared for thirty seconds before Ida Jean received a chipper answering machine message from Pam, promising her that an attendant would be available shortly. Three calls later, spaced over two hours, Ida Jean concluded that every staff member had taken the same day off, or that they'd all gotten food poisoning from the suspicious sautéed truffles at the restaurant.

The storm had shaken Ida Jean. For hours afterward, she had huddled under a blanket in her room, sniffling and trembling. She'd assumed something paranormal had happened on the first day—only a paranormal entity could have controlled her actions without controlling her thoughts—but during the storms, her thoughts had been affected. She'd been seized by an urge to write, and that urge had overtaken her reasoning, her memories, and her own fear. If Ida Jean's conscious mind had been consumed, how could she assert that she wasn't going insane?

But the incident hadn't robbed everything from her. During that awful time, as she'd scrawled illegible words on damp paper, she'd still felt ripples of discontent, flashes of clarity. The more she reflected on that period of time, the more convinced she became that she hadn't temporarily gone crazy. Her mind had been a battlefield for two forces, one that was Ida Jean's native state and one that was totally and absurdly foreign. Her family had no history of dissociative identity disorder, so Ida Jean could conclude that that force she'd fought against had not been natural. The invasive influence could only have been the same paranormal entity she'd suspected all along.