Why is it that the secrets we don’t like to talk about during our lives are the same secrets we don’t want to take to the grave with us?

The day before dying on a hospital bed after a long battle with cancer, my mother told me a story that happened the year after I went off to college. The story was as strange as the time she chose to tell it.

How’s that for an opening hook? These lines from Mariano Alonso’s short story “Nemesia’s Garden” (published in Cemetery Dance #76) drew me in quicker than the snap of a Venus flytrap.

The story is set primarily in the Dakota Building in Manhattan (filmed as “The Bramford” by Roman Polanski in Rosemary’s Baby; coincidentally, CD#76 also features an essay by Peter Straub marking the 50th anniversary of Ira Levin’s landmark horror novel). Thankfully, though, Alonso doesn’t recur to the device of devilish impregnation. Matters here (involving the botanical extravaganza of a room occupied by the aged, wheelchair-bound eponymous character) are much more exotic and eccentric than suggested by the story’s quaint title.

Alonso’s plot proceeds with subtlety and misdirection, building skillfully to a twisty revelation in the closing paragraphs. Dealing in sibling rivalry, surreptitious poisons, and wild transmogrifications, “Nemesia’s Garden” exudes a modern fairy tale air. But its fantastic elements are well grounded in the everyday, and rooted in the historical (as the story hearkens back to post-Nazi-invasion Poland). Alonso has crafted a tale that is at once beautifully descriptive and hauntingly outre. This latest edition of Cemetery Dance presents several strong stories, but “Nemesia’s Garden” without doubt forms the dark highlight of the issue.

***

Postscript: if you are interested in learning more about the haunted history of the Dakota Building, check out this short essay by Orrin Grey.