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In this week’s d’Verse Poets, the host, Frank J. Tassone, invites us “to write a haibun that alludes to memory. To our past, any way you construe it.”

In response to the poetry prompt, I wrote about a long forgotten memory of a hotel room in the Northern Ireland city of Belfast. 

I was working as a dance director, putting on a show. The production was at one of the top hotels in the city.

I thank Frank J. Tassone for hosting and for his thought provoking prompt.

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The Room in the Hotel Annex

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Horror & Supernatural content. *Do not read this haibun if you are of a nervous disposition.

A violent wind blasts through the room. The curtains lift and slap flat against the ceiling. The gust sucks the air out. I cannot breathe. There are screams — sharp enough to curdle blood.

Arms hang from inverted bodies, shadows dangling from the ceiling. Mouths gape black holes frozen mid shriek. Blood slides down the walls in slow, dark streaks.

I sit up. I think I’m dreaming. But they’re still there. The sound is sharp and piercing. I flee the room.

At the doorway I stop. The corridor is icy, filled with a quivering grey mist. It stretches into a dim vanishing point. The lights barely touch the gloom. I grip the jamb to steady myself. I look left — the corridor is shorter, but just as colourless. The wood trembles under my hand. Then I realise it’s me.

I turn left and stumble downstairs to the lobby. My ashen face startles the night porter; his fear shifts to concern.

I cannot stay in that room.

the night‑mare rides out
across the wasted moorland
under the blood moon

I’m here to choreograph the hotel’s new cabaret show, and the job comes with a room in the modern annex. I ask to be moved to the main building — any room at all. I beg.

There is no other room.

My employer, brisk and efficient, asks why. I tell her.

Her face drains. Her voice softens. She confides the truth:

The annex — and my bedroom — stand on the site where an IRA bomb once destroyed part of the old hotel, killing and injuring many.

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NOTE

They did not offer me another room in the hotel. Wild horses could not have persuaded me to spend a second night there — not even a “Mare of the Night.” I lodged for the rest of my contract at a relative’s house, about twenty‑five miles outside Belfast.

I drove more than fifty miles a day through ice and snow to rehearsals rather than spend another night in the annex.