Chapter 1
The memory of Ireland was a hazy soup in his mind. He could remember green fields and long nights in the cold of winter when women broke into song and old men told stories to terrify and delight. He could feel the dirty and uneven cobblestone streets that were falling apart under his feet as he and his father walked into town for springtime festivals and markets. He remembered the sense of community they shared as everyone gathered around a pot of still warm potatoes to eat. Greedy hands pulling and grabbing while mouths smiled and laughed as all the people in his village ate. Matthew could also remember how the food they ate slowly shrank and shrank, until it was almost nothing. He remembered a gnawing hunger, clawing through his belly. He could still see his father’s desperation as they were out in the fields together, picking through plot after plot of blighted potatoes, ultimately finding nothing salvageable. He could remember his mother, a faint warmth that laid dying on the only bed in their little cottage. How her life trickled away. She was starving and sick from the same hunger that plagued him, his father, and their whole country. All the women in the village keened for days on end when they buried their dead. In the final days before Matthew and his father left they always had dead to bury, the keening was never ending.
The boat ride to the new world had been terrifying at first. The water rushed under him as old stories of mermaids told by drunken sailors in the town tavern swirled around his mind. They were packed tightly into a cabin with 3 other families from his village. A few of them had children that were close to his age, so he could play and laugh with them all day. They raced around the boat and got yelled at in English by the crew and wealthier passengers. His father whispered in Gaelic to him in quite moments. There were promises of a new life, a better house, good food, and all new luxuries that they would praise God for every Sunday at church. When Matthew saw the small, misty figure of the Statue of Liberty on the horizon for the first time he was almost vibrating with joy. That faded fast though, as they arrived at Ellis Island and were detained for several more weeks still. His father was allowed out into New York before him, looking for work and somewhere to live. Matthew spent weeks alone on the Island, only an old woman who had sailed over from the old world with them left to look after him. The people were overflowing and stacked into the buildings. Everyone slept 2 or 3 to a bunk, it smelt bad all the time and Matthew was always surrounded by languages he didn’t speak. There were many who spoke his native tongue of Gaelic, but all the immigration officers would speak was English. Matthew was a smart boy and he managed to learn a few English words before his father came back for him.
The building his father had found for them to live in was a tenement building caked with soot into thin wood that the winter winds blew through like the walls were slatted. It was meager and dirty, but for a time all was good and blessed. His father’s promises on the boat over weren’t wholly true; they were still poor, but at least they weren’t starving as badly. New York wasn’t like Ireland, where they lived and breathed with the families in their village, but it grew to feel like home. Hell’s Kitchen, the neighborhood his father had found for them, was predominantly Irish. The church they attend for Mass every Sunday had a priest who gave his sermons in Gaelic, so the whole congregation could understand. The pub on the street corner where his father went to drink, had musicians who played Irish folk music. Matthew could sit on his father’s lap and look and listen as lively couples danced to the music of their homeland. In the alley behind their tenement building Matthew peaked through closed curtains as his father battled in an Irish style as well. Bare knuckle boxing, shirtless, and feet rooted in the spot. He took swing after swing like he had the Devil in him.
The school Matthew eventually attended was the only time he had to leave the safety of Hell’s Kitchen. Two winter’s had come and gone since their arrival to New York and the time had come when he needed to go to a new school for older children. With his father working in a factory in the Garment District, the money he made on the side for boxing bets, and Matthew running a paper route after school they had enough money his father sent him to a Catholic school in Midtown. The nuns could be cruel and kind in turns, but he quickly learned he was no longer allowed to speak Gaelic on school grounds. The few times he tried it his knuckles were rapt with a ruler. He also grew to realize just how poor they really were. In Hell’s Kitchen all of the children his age ran about with holes in their trousers and soot on their cheeks from days spent playing in the streets. In this new school, the hems of his hand sew jackets and perpetually patched trousers labeled him as a target to be picked on. The first day he came home with blood on his knuckles and a split lip his father made him spend hours on his knees praying for God to bless him with the virtue of patience. Jack Murdock also found his way to church that evening. He needed confession, because the Murdock boys had the Devil in them, and he had sinned in passing that along to his son.
Fighting in the new world didn’t have the same rules as it did in the old world, his father explained to him. It wasn’t just about settling a grudge or upholding your manhood, Americans wanted entertainment and fighting gave them that. Where there was entertainment, there was money to be made. Where there was money, there were people who wanted a piece of your winnings. Not all the men who came from Ireland were good Irish Catholics, some were bad men and worse, some were mobsters. Cash or a pound of flesh was the deal Matthew’s father had struck with them, and when the day came he couldn’t provide them cash they took a pound of flesh. Battling Jack Murdock always assumed that when the day came he couldn’t pay, it would be his head on the chopping block. When he saw the baseball bat connect with the back of Matthew’s head, he prayed to God he would never be so stupid again.
The world was different for Matthew after that. He was plunged into darkness, blind but still alive by the grace of God. He spent the first few weeks knocking around their apartment, helping where he could with chores and only leaving the house for weekly church clinging tightly to his father as a guide. After he learned every crack and corner in the house, he managed to make it outside more often. The sounds and smells of the world felt different now, fully bodied and almost colorful on their own, even without sights to accompany them. He couldn’t make it out as far as his old catholic school in Mid Town yet, but he learned to tap his way around Hell’s Kitchen with a walking stick aiding his senses. He found which streets he could cross alone and which ones he needed to ask for help with. He used the smells coming from bakeries, factories, and restaurants around the neighborhood to pinpoint exactly where he was if he ever got lost. After only a year he could make his way through town to the Frenchman's music shop all the way on the edge of the neighborhood to do light chores and be taught braille in exchange.
There was also the matter of learning how to to do things with only the aid of touch. On the nights his father came home from rougher and rougher boxing matches, his face and hands were split and bleeding. When they didn’t have money for a doctor, which was often, Matthew got out their little sewing kit. With needles curved especially to make sewing skin easier, he patched up his father’s punching bag skin. The two curled up together on those nights, Matthew fell asleep to Jack whispering whiskey laden apologies in his ear.
It was on one of the nights like this when everything in Matthew’s life changed again. He woke alone, his father’s side of the bed cold and empty. The sound that woke him in the quiet of night was the shattering of glass echoing through the apartment. There was only one place in their rooms with glass and that was the windows in the front room that overlooked the street outside. He felt his way out into the front room, everything in the house silent in sleep with only the ambient noise of the city leaking in from the outside. The city life got louder as he got closer to the front room and as he ran his hand along a shattered paine of glass his thought process had been confirmed. Now, the only question was what broke the glass. He felt around on the ground for a brick or a rock. It wasn’t exactly common, but surely not unheard of for teenagers from other neighborhoods to come into Hell’s Kitchen in the night. They were tourists finding joy in smashing street lights and throwing rocks at second story tenements like theirs. What Matthew ended up finding on the floor wasn’t a rock, but something warm and thick oozing across their rough hewn floors. The liquid wasn’t deep, but it spread out wide and Matthew knew exactly what it was. The texture was exactly like what had been on his fingers not hours before when he patched up his father. He was stepping in blood.
He took in a sharp breath as he stumbled to the side and tripped over something. His hands flew down to feel at the lump he tripped on and his fingers caught on flesh and fabric. He felt his way up to the figure’s face and found his father’s stubble and eyebrow he had stitched a day before. He let himself have a small sigh of relief, his father had stumbled drunk out of bed before. He must have been doing the same thing as Matthew, investigating the broken glass. The blood must be from a cut where he stumbled and fell, and now he was just unconscious.
“Dad,” he said softly, shaking his shoulder to wake him.
There was no response.
“Dad come on, we gotta go back to bed,” again he tried, shaking his father a little harder and calling a little louder.
Still no response.
“Stick, I think the kid’s blind,” an unfamiliar voice called from across the room.
Startled, Matthew scrambled back. He latched onto his father’s slumped form for protection. Even though his was blind, Matthew still usually had a good idea of where people were around him. He had gotten nothing from this stranger. The voice, when it had spoken, sounded only a few feet away from him, yet he hadn’t heard anything. This new voice was invisible, not only that they were a stranger, a threat, in his home.
“No shit,” another voice called. It sounded gravelly with age and father away, but he could hear footsteps creaking down the hall towards the front room. “I knew that when he got out of bed and walked out here.”
“No way,” a third new voice called, close to him and yet again invisible. “You’re just being a smart ass.”
“You didn’t hear him stomp down the hall like a blind fool?” It was the aged voice again, now in the front room with the rest of them. “I don’t need to see him hanging onto a dead man with his throat ripped out to know the kid can’t see shit.”
He felt it as his heart skipped a beat at those words. Dead man. With his throat ripped out. Matthew’s fingers ghosed up from where he was gripping onto his father’s shirt to his neck. There was no prickly stubble, or fresh shaven skin, only slick and rapidly cooling blood. He didn’t, couldn’t believe his hands, he pressed down searching for skin underneath but met only corded muscle and stabbing bone shards. He forgot about the unfamiliar voices then and let out a wail that would put all the keening women of Ireland to shame.
“Stop that,” the gravelly voice commanded.
All at once a calm flooded through Matthew’s body and his crying ceased.
“Good, now come here.” It commanded and Matthew got to his feet.
“Stick, I know what you’re thinking, but what are we going to do with a blind kid?” One of the other voices called.
Ignoring the question, the Stick, the one with the gravelly voice, took Matthew’s chin in his hand. “Were you born blind?”
“No,” Matthew wanted to rip his head away from the cold hand holding him, but no matter how hard he grit his teeth he couldn’t move an inch.
“How did you become blind?”
“My father is… was a boxer. He had a deal with the Irish mob, and when he couldn’t pay one day they came for me.” Matthew balled his fists as he spoke, but he still felt that invisible prison of calm holding him steady.
“Son of a boxer,” Stick mused. “And a fighter yourself,” the hand removed itself from his chin to come down and grab Matthew’s scarred and scabbed knuckles. “I think you’ll do well.”
Before Matthew could ask what he meant, or even think of what to say the veil of calm lifted. He felt his sorrow, anger, and pain all come rushing back and it was overwhelming. He opened his mouth to cry out, something, anything to release the tension, but again his world turned on a dime. A cutting, and sharp pain exploded through his neck and ripped out through his whole body. Panic flooded his senses as everything came rushing into sharp focus. A soft tongue lapped at the wound on his neck as his mind began to go dark.
This man was a vampire.
His father was killed by a vampire.
He was being killed by a vampire.