I shivered. I couldn’t help it. Dolls in general were inherently creepy. Their inexpressive eyes and knowing smiles, their lifeless limbs and outstretched hands that seemed to be beckoning to you. Yet these rejects took the cake. Even in the gloomy light of day they were menacing. The sun had bubbled and scabbed their “skin,” while the rain had eroded much of their paint, leaving behind waxy skull-like faces the color of bone meal. Pita’s description had been quite apt: they really did look like dead babies—horribly mutilated dead babies with black-rimmed eyes and tufts of wasting hair. And aside from their state of dissolution, many were decapitated or missing arms and legs, while others were nothing more than butchered torsos, or disembodied heads impaled on broken boughs.

As I progressed through their ranks, I found it rather unnerving to have so many sets of soulless eyes trained on me. They might be nothing more than glass orbs, unseeing, lacking consciousness or menace, yet I couldn’t shake the sensation of being watched, of the dolls twisting their heads and limbs unnaturally to follow me after I’d passed them by.

I stopped beside a sagging timber hut with a corrugated iron roof. The majority of the dolls attached to the warped wood were the porcelain-faced variety—these had dominated the island thus far—but among them I was surprised to see a Cabbage Patch Kid, a troll doll, and several nude Barbie dolls.

Footsteps sounded behind me. I turned just in time for Pepper to snap a picture of me.

“That better not be for your documentary,” I said.

“It’s only a photograph, Jack. It’s for my private collection.”

“Private collection? You sound like you have a trunk full of body parts somewhere.”

He assumed feigned hurt, hand on hips. “You know me, Jack, I’m a pacifist.”

Actually, I didn’t know Pepper was a pacifist, and the revelation surprised me. I’d always considered anyone who felt bad about stepping on a bug once in a while a bit of an oddball—unless, of course, you went out of your way to step on bugs, and if that were the case, you had a whole different set of problems.

I said, “So you’ve never flushed a spider down the toilet?”

“What are you talking about, Jack? I hate spiders. I kill them all the time. I’m opposed to violence. People-against-people violence.”

“I thought pacifists were opposed to violence categorically because of the karmic consequences and all that.”

“You’re thinking of Ghandi, Jack. You can definitely be a regular pacifist and kill spiders.” He stopped next to me and studied the wall. “Wow, Barbies!” He raised his camera, adjusted the focus, and snapped consecutive shots. “What do you think happened to that one? I’ve seen a few like it.” He indicated a doll that appeared charred, as if it had been set on fire.