The Bone Yard by Mahendra Onteru

A chilling small-town horror novel of secrets, guilt, and the thing waiting beneath the water.

Millbury, Maine- a forgotten town that doesn't appear on maps anymore, and for a good reason. The quarry at its edge has been closed for decades, yet no one dares to go near it- not kids on dares, not the old men who whisper at the diner. The water lies black and bottomless, a wound in the earth that never heals.
When construction crews uncover bones in the quarry's shadow- too many bones, in too many layers- Detective Claire Hensley is sent from Boston to investigate. She's already haunted by her past, scarred by a case that nearly broke her. But what she finds in Millbury isn't a crime scene. It's legacy. A bargain. A lie that has kept the town safe for generations… until now.
As Claire digs deeper, the ground itself begins to hum. Old men mutter about debts coming due. Children wake screaming, whispering names they shouldn't know. The pit calls to her- and the more she resists, the closer it gets.
The Bone Yard is a chilling, emotionally charged horror novel about guilt that won't stay buried and a town where silence is deadly.

Amazon

Excerpt from The Bone Yard © Copyright 2025 Mahendra Onteru

1

CHAPTER ONE

The Quarry Gives Up Its Dead

The men who found the bones weren’t looking for trouble. They were looking for payday.

It was the first warm week of April, the kind where the ground was still hard in the mornings but turned into muck by noon, and the smell of thawed earth came up through the air like something rotten beneath a floorboard. The crew was out at the edge of the Millbury quarry, digging a trench for the new road the county swore would bring traffic back to town. “Economic revival,” the selectmen had called it at the last meeting, which was a laugh. Millbury hadn’t had an economy to revive in twenty years.

Still, a job was a job.

Danny Keene wiped sweat off his brow with the back of his glove and spat into the dirt. He was thirty-two, stocky, with a beer gut that hung a little too far over his belt, but strong in the shoulders. He’d been working this crew since high school, first with his uncle, now under Eddie Marsh. Eddie was the foreman, which mostly meant he yelled at people and smoked too much, but Danny didn’t mind. Eddie had a mean streak, sure, but he also bought the first round on Friday nights at The Split Rock, and in Millbury, that counted for something.

“Christ, this ground’s like iron,” said Pete Dufresne, the kid running the backhoe. He was nineteen, all elbows and acne scars, with a Red Sox cap pulled low over his greasy hair. “Feels like I’m diggin’ into concrete.”

Danny chuckled. “That’s what you get in Millbury, kid. Stone and more stone. Quarry don’t ever give easy.”

“Quarry takes more than it gives,” Eddie Marsh muttered from behind them. He was standing with a cigarette pinched between two fingers, eyes squinting against the morning sun. Eddie was only in his thirties but looked older—like the rock dust had gotten into his skin, ground him down. He didn’t laugh when he said it, and Danny felt a little chill crawl down his back before he looked away.

The backhoe groaned as Pete worked it deeper, the bucket teeth biting into the ground with a sound like nails on slate. Then there was a clunk. Not the sound of stone, exactly. Something different. Hollow.

“Hit somethin’,” Pete said.

Danny rolled his eyes. “You’re always hittin’ somethin’. Big deal.”

But Eddie had stepped forward. He flicked his cigarette into the dirt and leaned over the trench, peering down. His face had gone tight, jaw clenched.

“Kill the engine,” he said.

Pete frowned but did as he was told, the backhoe rattling to silence. Suddenly the world felt very quiet—the kind of quiet that makes your ears hum. Just the wind skimming over the half-flooded quarry pit, carrying with it the faint tang of algae and rust.

“Grab a shovel,” Eddie said.

Danny sighed but jumped down into the trench. The dirt was damp, clumping heavy. He shoved the blade of the shovel in and turned a load over. More dirt. Another load. Then—

White.

At first he thought it was a stone, some pale hunk of quartz, but when he scratched at it with his gloved hand, he saw the curve. Smooth, almost polished. A dome.

And two black holes staring back at him.

Danny dropped the shovel. “Oh, Jesus.”

“What is it?” Pete leaned forward from the backhoe seat, eyes wide.

Danny couldn’t answer right away. His throat had gone dry, the way it does when you know you’ve just crossed a line you can’t uncross.

Eddie climbed into the trench beside him. He crouched down, reached out with two fingers, and brushed the soil away from the rest of it. The dirt fell like brown snow. The shape became clearer.

A skull.

Small. Too small.