Earthenware

Description

He takes an organ from each body and leaves a clay tablet in its place, carved in a script no one reads. Set the tablets side by side and they spell out directions — to where the rest of his work is buried.

Out past the dig sites and dust of the basin, the dead are found hollowed and refilled, each cavity holding a hand-pressed tablet inscribed in a private code. Apart, the tablets are gibberish. Together, a forensic anthropologist realizes, they’re a map written in pieces across many bodies, pointing somewhere out in the open desert.

Pottery conservator Sahar Niazi gets pulled in to date the clay and decipher the marks, and the more tablets she fits together, the clearer the destination becomes — a place that promises to hold years of the man’s careful labor. When she’s one tablet short of a location, a courteous stranger offers to provide the last piece. He just needs to make it first.

Dry, dread-soaked, and patient, this is horror about a man building a monument out of people. Walton pairs wet clay and grave dust into something genuinely unholy. You’ll want to know where the map leads. You really shouldn’t.

Fit the last tablet. Read where it points. Don’t go.