I took a belt of vodka and pressed on, following the well-beaten path. For a while I tried to pick out a doll to give to Pita—a peace offering of sorts—but I couldn’t find any that resembled her. For starters, about ninety-nine percent of the dolls were Caucasian, which I found strange. China had Chinese dolls. Japan had Japanese dolls. Weren’t there any patriotic doll makers in Mexico?

Eventually I came across one doll with black hair that could pass as Pita if you ignored the pigmentation. Nevertheless, I left it where it was because it was seriously evil-looking, and if I gave it to Pita, she would likely accuse me of making fun of her.

When I was roughly halfway back to the side of the island where we’d disembarked, I came to a dilapidated cabin. Unlike the hut Pepper and I had investigated, this was much larger and featured a porch with an actual swinging door.

I tried the door, expecting it to be locked. It opened, and I stepped inside. The main room was dark and carried the forgotten smell of wood rot and age. There was a contrary feel to it, perhaps because there were no windows, though gaps between the corrugated iron roof and the timber walls allowed for some natural light.

When my eyes adjusted to the murkiness, I found myself in what you might call a living room. There was no TV or stereo or anything resembling modernity. But there were two rattan chairs, a table, and a bookcase, all of which appeared to have been rescued from a trash heap. More junk littered the floor, or at least what I considered to be junk, though Solano would have likely begged to differ. Some of the detritus included glass bottles, tires, an umbrella, a lunch box, a handsaw, a hammer, even a very old car seat.

And of course there were dolls—a riot of them, thirty, forty, more. Most were like those outside, discolored and blistered and boiled from the tropical sun. They were affixed to the walls, a cornucopia of creepy, crawly, bump-in-the-night abominations, and once again the sight of so many of them filled me with a niggle of trepidation and sadness.

I wondered why they made me feel like this, and some Freudian mumbo-jumbo I read once came to mind, something regarding an inherent contradiction. Dolls are inanimate objects, they’re lifeless, but because they look like us, they appear alive—and when something that’s not alive appears too alive its familiarity turns to unfamiliarity, our brains reject it as unnatural, and our feelings for it sour toward revulsion.

A roundabout way, I guess, of saying dolls are just plain spooky.