Honeysuckle Haunts

De: Darlene Zagata

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The first thing visitors notice about Madison Valley isn't the quaint Victorian houses or the weathered charm of Main Street. It's the smell.

Sweet. Cloying. Intoxicating.

Honeysuckle.

The wild vines grow everywhere—climbing telephone poles, choking fence posts, cascading over abandoned barns like nature's own funeral shroud. In late spring and early summer, when the tiny white and yellow flowers bloom, the fragrance becomes so thick you can taste it on your tongue, feel it settling in your lungs like perfumed fog.

Locals will tell you it's beautiful. They'll smile and speak of tradition, of their annual festival, of how blessed they are to live in such a naturally gorgeous place. They'll sell you honeysuckle honey, honeysuckle soap, honeysuckle candles. They'll pose for pictures beside the vine-covered gazebo in the town square.

What they won't tell you is why the honeysuckle grows so well here. Why it spreads with such supernatural vigor, why its roots run so impossibly deep, why it seems to whisper when the wind moves through its leaves.

They won't tell you about the soil it feeds on. Rich, dark soil that was watered with blood over a century ago. Soil that holds secrets the town's founding families have spent four generations trying to bury.

But secrets, like the dead, have a way of clawing their way back to the surface. And in Madison Valley, they bloom with the sweet scent of honeysuckle and the bitter taste of revenge.