Wade M. Barrow

Childe Barrow to the Dark Tower Comes

Apparent Age: 45
Affiliation: Invictus
Clan: Daeva
City Status: 3
Clan Status: 1
Public Traits: Blood Potency 2, Humanity 7, Presence 3

Lineage

Mister Wade Barrow, childe of Her Grace Madam Josephine Blackwell-Finch, Patron of the House Jade, Duchess and Prince of Carcosa, childe of the deceased Mister Colby Ryall, Soldier, childe of the eclipsed Mister Sebastian Fawkner, Soldier, childe of presumed eclipsed Alder Behenna Rashleigh, Speaker, childe of The Right Honorable Alder Warren Keast, Marquis of Cornwall and Councilor, childe of The Honorable Alder Conner Arundell, Earl of Devon and Advisor.

Background

Before Embrace

Square in the middle of the 60s, square in the middle of California, Wade Mitchell Barrow was born to a widow, his father having succumbed to pancreatic cancer only a few dozen hours prior. His mother, Janice, fell into a deep postpartum depression which took her many months to fully overcome. Though his aunt Grace took up the slack whenever Janice was too sick to care for Wade, and although he was never in any danger, his earliest memories are of a dimly lit house haunted by a mute presence veiled in unkempt brown hair. Once emerged from her torment, Janice spent the rest of his youth alternately spoiling him and playing the role of disciplinarian, almost as if in apology. If any of this had a lasting result, it was to confuse him about what exactly he deserved, liberty or a firm hand, a master or a servant.

He remembers being twelve years old, watching Carcosa fly to pieces on TV, helicopter shots of city blocks burning, swarms of hooded rioters lit by red and blue police lights, storefront windows coming down like waterfalls, orange body bags in rows, ambulances crossing paths with military jeeps.

In the early 80s he moved to Los Angeles to be a screenplay writer, but succeeded only in two things: having his (admittedly pedestrian) screenplay plagiarized by a writer he admired, and being rather severely mugged and thrashed twice on the same street. Thanks to these incidents, he learned that trust in someone should correlate negatively with their talent: the better they are, the easier it is for them to steal. Carry a knife—that’s the other thing he learned. Going to the cinema and typing pretentious dialog was replaced with going to the cinema and smoking dope with a bunch of so-called theater stagehands who perpetually dressed in black despite being perpetually unemployed.

On a whim, Wade convinced his black-clad troupe to move to New York City together, where they promptly forgot the impetus for their quest and stopped returning each others’ calls. He found himself alone, without prospects, without a degree. High school had seemed to him a joyless zoo where stunted creatures slunk about their cages and nipped at each other and the keepers tossed in scraps through the bars and called it a day. Wade had dropped out in his senior year and called it graduation. So what could a young man do in the Big Worm-Eaten Apple but to keep himself afloat with a series of go-nowhere retail jobs while trying to prove it was possible to become enlightened from a pile of haphazardly chosen library books on literature, science, and history? If nothing else, it inspired him to take some of the random facts and bits of lore he’d gleaned and weave them into a fantasy novel called _The Marigolden Ones_, which he sold for a flat fee of 200 dollars to a slippery agent named Hansson who, rumor had it, judged every manuscript by having his assistant crack it open to page 50 and read that page, and only that one, aloud. The pride Wade felt for having written a single 200-dollar page expired the moment he realized that Hansson, as an extra little perk, had decided to “enhance” the novel by splicing pages of another, completely different work haphazardly throughout _The Marigolden Ones_, only changing character names and altering a few sentences in a shaky attempt to conceal the seams between the two stories. Wade would later learn that this splicing treatment had been done in the interest of boosting sales with a little “blood and breasts”.

Enraged, he stalked to the publishing house clutching his maimed oeuvre, daydreaming about his immanent arrest for arson using a schizophrenic fantasy novel as accelerant, or assault with intent to cause multitudinous paper cuts. But Hansson, slippery as can be, talked him into getting a job in the mailroom on the ground floor, instead. So he did. In a matter of months, he was editing manuscripts and reading page 50 to Hansson.

By the time he had his own agency in Carcosa, Wade had surpassed old Hansson, that son of a bitch. He knew what made a book hot, _really_ hot, what made it pour off the shelves: blood. More than tits, more than ass, more than drugs, certainly more than art.

In His Own Words

“Blood sells.

Those other things don’t hurt, of course. But cover them in blood, and you have yourself a winner. Violence and filth, crime and depravity, stylized or romanticized—bloody all the same. If you cry rape in an alley, no one will come running, but if you write rape in a paperback, they’ll come running with wallets open by the millions. In the sequel, raise the body count and watch the sales figures surge. That’s a fact. It’s a dark world, that much is a truism, but don’t let anyone tell you people buy novels to escape. Escapism is a myth. If people truly wanted to escape, they’d read Jane Austen. They’d read Dunsany. More than a few of my clients have been on the Carcosa Times’ best sellers list, and I don’t remember seeing Dunsany there any time soon.

People don’t want to escape. They want to over-indulge, to numb whatever lobe of the brain responds to misery and terror; they want to exhaust the cones and rods in their eyeballs with the same lurid colors for weeks on end, hoping to finally look away from the last page and see the after-image of a better world around them.

But we all know what happens to after-images. They fade until we can only see them when we close our eyes.

And then they’re gone.”

Journal Excerpt 3/2/09

"This is a story about a man who traded away whimsy and Romance (with a capital R--not the kind Fabio posed for) for cynicism and nihilism. You can always tell whether you've traded down by counting the -isms at the end of whatever you receive. –Ism is the used van of suffixes. It’ll only take you so far, carry so much bullshit, but beyond a certain point, you’re stuck pushing it down a one-lane road in the middle of a hardpan plain, knowing the only guy who’ll take it off your hands now is the junk man. Ayn Rand said sacrifice is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a non-value. She'd say this man betrayed his true values, that he let strangers trample in his rose garden, that he threw a lifeline to his drowning enemy, then let him steer the ship. But Ayn was a homely bitch, so what does she know?

At about the same time our hero lost his sense of Romance, he downgraded from being a Hero to being merely a Protagonist, which is a Hero who doesn’t make anyone any promises, and is careful not to venture into lairs that look like they could house anything much larger than he. This is the Hero just trying to get by, you see, and while he may go through “arcs”, he doesn’t do quests. Quests set people up for disappointment. Soon thereafter, our protagonist pawned off the mantle of the Protagonist for that of the cooler, sexier Anti-hero, who is really just a Protagonist who wants the mythic allure of a Hero, but would rather breed exotic monsters for profit than go on fools’ adventures to slay them. But, not to be outdone by edgy comic-book and television writers everywhere, he slunk one step further, kneeling calmly down in an intersection somewhere in Saigon, Carcosa, Buddhist-monk-style, and, rather than letting someone douse him in gasoline and set him ablaze, which would have been the noble thing to do, he let someone overturn a dump truck’s worth of shit on him and he stewed in it until the smell stopped bothering him.

I’m sounding like a fanfic writer who cannot, for fuck’s sake, put a period at the end of the bloated run-on sentence he calls a “pitch”.

Okay. Here’s the pitch.

Man wants to publish works of fancy. Settles for publishing the work of others. Stoops to browbeating them into punching up their work with a couple more murders. Soars to smooth-talking them into slathering blood-soaked mayhem on every chapter of their work, until the paper fibers are soaked, and the ink is running down a maimed rape victim and an em dash. Calls this a living.

J tells me the hunt comes naturally. The depraved shit I have helped put on bookshelves across the world bears out, to a tiny but undeniable degree, the truth of her assertion. I’ve been hunting for years. I’ve been manipulating the spineless for years. I’ve been charming and wooing to my own ends for years. I’ve been looking for ways to cram in a few more victims in every fictional dumpster, in every fictional alley, for years, negotiating for ways to pack more stab wounds, more cigarette burns, into one dead prostitute for years, and, worse yet, I’ve been doing it by proxy. Don’t even have the patience to write a good torture scene on my own; I make other talent (if talent is the word) do the torturing for me with a QWERTY keyboard. Practically gave birth to a whole genre, Real Crime—like True Crime only worse. I’ve convinced a significant portion of the market that even actual heinous acts are not heinous enough to merit your bedtime reading.

Believing all this, how can I have the gall to be horrified by what I now do?

At least, at the moment, I feel no great urge to go cruising for another victim. Time to figure out how to keep my business, keep my clients. Time to start making calls and rescheduling for evening appointments.

The hunt never ends."

Embrace

Journal Excerpt 3/10/09

"And while I'm on the subject of her eyes, let it be said that I wish, how I wish, that I still thought she was only a precocious twenty-nothing, a college nymph with a body coaxed from Parian marble and jade-idol eyes made for smuggling away from a shrine under the cover of night. How I wish I could ogle her like I did before I was quite aware that it was _I_ who was being smuggled, and _she_ the bandit. Misogyny? Or do I simply like my lovers uncomplicated."

Hooked and Reeled In

Recently and happily divorced, middle-aged, and feeling a bit uninspired with the routine of his life for the past few years, how could he turn down an opportunity to play around with this strange and stunning young woman? She was gorgeous, sure--enough for a lifetime of fond memories even if her urge for an older man burned out like a quirky bulb in two or three months, which is what he suspected would happen--but she had class well beyond her years, a real marrow-deep sort of class, and a kind of raw certainty that one just didn't find in women her age, a conviction in her eyes and voice as though there was no doubt in her mind who she was, what she wanted, and what was hers to take. He went away from their motel romps with increasing wonder at her preternatural poise, but also with a growing anxiety, almost wholly unconscious, that made his torso muscles sore from tightness throughout the day, and froze his ribs to a wooden cage flush against his lungs.

But it was easy to ignore the anxiety. When he noticed it at all, he explained the anxiety away as the physical symptoms of a battle raging inside him between his intellect, on the one hand, which knew this girl should be treated as a passing thing, a bauble that would roll away in time, and, on the other hand, a particularly stupid and emotional subset of his brain, which had probably misplaced the feelings of love he once had with his ex-wife onto Josephine. Along with that, he figured, he was probably just worried about whether he would ever find someone as beautiful and attractive as her any time before his 80th birthday; after all, they just don't make many women like Josephine. If they did, he would have seen them already.

This one was different. Sometimes, he would get tunnel vision just looking at her, as if he were in a corridor of dark fog, and she were at the other end, and everything around them were haze and shadows, and sounds just fluttering echoes and hums over which her words floated, and he found himself nodding and laughing, and once or twice he found himself agreeing to something she'd asked without even registering what the request was. Other times he felt a pull to treat her as a confidant, to dredge up unpleasant memories he'd consigned to obscurity decades before, things about his mother and her caprices, betrayals he'd perpetrated on friends and lovers, acts of petty revenge and fantasies of murder. Even if he didn't always reveal these things, the pull was there, the insane and unfounded trust to yield up his sins to her.

And occasionally, as he admired her flesh with his eyes and hands, doubts would come into his mind. The way her complexion seemed to change like weather, evening out from a ruddy blush to a pale creme, her skin palette changing from warms to cools no matter what light shown on her, and then back to the warmer pinks when they were tangled up together, and sometimes back again to a cool hue if she let him linger around long enough. Besides the color change, there were her accompanying heat fluctuations, which pendulated between extremes that in most people would signify sickness: feverishly hot and almost painfully cold. And when she was palest and coldest, and he studied her carefully, her flesh took on an odd quality before his eyes and under his fingertips, like dry meat perfectly preserved on the bone, unresponsive and taught. In their final few nights as a pair of lovers, either Wade picked up on these clues more, or Josephine concealed them less enthusiastically, but either way, it added to the tightening of his ribcage.

To say nothing of his exhaustion and listlessness after they parted, and the half-formed memories he had of violence in their bed that was not entirely playful.

Ah, but these were only the bizarre thoughts of a man in furious lust, grown obsessed with a unique young woman to the point of near madness.

Until the night she sat on the motel bed and told him what she was.

After Embrace

It was a rough beginning, but it could have been rougher.

He had to learn some things, like who he could give commands to, and who he couldn't. He had to strain his dead muscles to the point of tearing, utterly in vain, so that he could learn Josephine's sheer physical strength. He had to suffer the infantilizing treatment of the older ones, and learn to accept it. He had to learn who his peers were.

Now that he has been manumitted and granted the Amptons domain, many pieces are moving. People are coming to him with requests rather than demands, and apologies rather than admonishments--and that's how he prefers it.

These nights, he is positioning himself to become an Au Pair and spreading his influence throughout the Amptons.