Dark Days WIP snippet

I've been working on a horror novel and I thought i'd give you a little snippet. I wrote this passage a couple of days ago and quite liked it. Of course it may never make it to the final novel but there's a good chance it'll survive in some form or other.


One of his teeth felt loose from where the guy had slugged him. Millward had started it, glaring at the man until he got up and came over, then hitting him once, twice, three times in the face before the guy could say a word. The man’s brawny neck had soaked up the punches like a boxer’s training pad, then he had hit Millward with what felt like a sledgehammer. Bar staff had broken it up then and Millward had stumbled outside and fled in case the man wanted a second round.

Why do I keep doing this to myself?

It felt strange to say it, but he had enjoyed being hit. The guy had probably outsized Millward by thirty kilograms and at least three inches in height. He hadn’t wanted to hit the guy, only to incite the guy to hit him, because pain was the only way to make himself remember that he was still alive, that blood still pushed its reluctant way through his veins.

He pulled the phone from his pocket and glanced at the clock. It was 1.47 a.m. He couldn’t remember what time he had got back to the police station with Welch, but it had been no later than nine.

Sometimes the time just disappeared. 

There were three missed calls from Welch on his phone, and a voicemail, but he ignored it, shutting the phone and putting it back in his pocket. She would just be hassling him again, either about work or wanting to fuck. He didn’t want to know about the first and the last would make him feel too guilty, even though it was tempting at times. Welch was a desperate, hollow soul like himself, but he feared that if he got too close to her they would simply dissolve into each other, disappear.

Yeah, I know either disappeared or disappear will have to change but I like both of those sentences at the moment. We'll see.

I'm up to 77 pages now (29,000 words) and hope to finish it around June or July. Of course, it might never get there but so far it's going well.

For anyone who's wondering, I'm also editing Tube Riders: Exile and its going okay. These are my two big projects at the moment. I have a couple of older novels I want to edit up into shape for possible future publication but I don't want to overload myself too much right now.