I'm not seeing spooky," I said. "Dark, yes, but what's spooky about it?""What's spooky?" Sam muttered.Hayley pointed. "You can't tell me that isn't creepy."I followed her finger to see branches draped in elegant, pale-green Spanish moss."That? Seriously? It's moss, Hayley, not an alien lifeform.
In the excerpt from Kelley Armstrong's "The Calling," a conversation unfolds among the characters Sam, Hayley, and the narrator regarding the eerie atmosphere surrounding them. The narrator expresses skepticism about the spookiness of their surroundings, labeling the dark environment as merely dark and not truly frightening. This sets up a contrast between the characters' perceptions of the setting. Hayley, however, points out a specific detail—branches covered in pale-green Spanish moss—which she finds unsettling. The narrator dismisses her notion of creepiness, arguing that it's just moss rather than something sinister. This exchange highlights a divergence in how different people perceive fear and the natural world, illustrating that what one may find unsettling, another may see as simply a part of nature.
