LesleyScoble.com

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 mare of night gallops
Swift o’er bleak grey moorland
‘Neath the blood moon’s spell

Lesley Scoble, May 2023

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

The Room in the Hotel Annex

A violent sudden wind blows, and the force lifts the billowing curtains up and flattens them against the ceiling. The dreadful gust sucked the air out. I cannot breathe. There are screams. Screams to curdle blood. Arms hang from inverted bodies and dangle downward in long, dark shadows from the ceiling. Many upside down mouths are agape in fixed, black, empty holes wide open in the mid shriek of stricken surprise. Blood pours down the walls, dripping in slow shadowed streaks to the floor.

I sit up. I think I am dreaming; but they are still there. The horror hasn’t gone away. The sound is unbelievable. It is sharp, plangent, and piercing. I flee the room. 

I halt at my hotel bedroom door and look out into the corridor. There is an icy chill. I look in fear to my right. The corridor is foggy with a quivering, smoky mist. The hallway is misty and grey. It is a long corridor with many doors stretching into the distance, narrowing to a dim, indistinct vanishing point. The hallway lights have no effect on breaking through the clouded gloom. I hold on to the jamb of the doorway to steady myself. I look to the left. The corridor is shorter, but devoid of colour too. I cling with reluctance to the doorway. The wood trembles and shakes under my hand, but I hold on to it. Then I realise it is I who trembles.

I turn left out of my room, and I somehow stumble downstairs to the lobby. My ashen face scares the night porter. Then I watch his expression of fear change to one of concern.

The mare of night gallops
Swift o’er bleak grey moorland
Neath the blood moon’s spell

 I cannot stay in the room.

I’m a resident in that room because I am choreographing dancers for a show. (the room in the annex comes with the job) They booked me to choreograph dance routines and stage a production in the hotel’s new cabaret show. Included in my contract is a room at the hotel while we rehearse. They provided me with the room in the modern annex adjoining the original hotel.

I tell them I need to change my hotel room. 

I request to swap for any other room in the main building. I beg them.

There is no other room. The room in the annex is mine. They are sorry.

My employer, an efficient lady, wants to know why I cannot stay in the room in the annex.

I tell her.

Her face blanches. Her tone quietens, and she confides in me and reveals a chilling fact.

They constructed the new annex (and my bedroom) on the site where an IRA bomb destroyed part of the old hotel, killing and maiming many. 

 Lesley Scoble, May 2023


 

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NOTE 

They did not offer me a change of room in the hotel. Wild horses could not persuade me to spend another night there. (not even a “Mare of the Night”) I lodged for the rest of my contract, at a relative’s house who lived in a town approximately 25 miles outside of Belfast. 

I drove over fifty miles a day through ice and snow to rehearsals, rather than spending another night in the room in the annex.