His wall was covered by them.

Framed images, sealed behind glass. A disjointed plethora, like a collage. Two of the room's walls could barely be seen; the paneling showed only through the narrow spaces between unadorned wooden frames.

He sank into the leather depths of his wing-backed chair, martini in hand, as his lethargic eyes slid across the collection. Life, he mused, was comprised of two things: that time in which we worked; and that time in which we reveled in what we had attained. Moments of perfect completion, sparsely scattered through a lifetime of sweat and toil that served only as a means to an end.

Thankfully, this was one of those moments. It was not the first, but so far, it was the best. But better lay ahead; as the collection progressed, and his taste and methods became more refined, better evenings, of even deeper satisfaction, were still to be had.

This gallery had taken countless days, months, years of meticulous labor to reach its present level of completeness. Of course, it wasn't finished, and may never be, while he lived. But for now, he would allow himself to have this - this moment of gloating. Reclining in comfort, and tranquility; gazing upon his work - his collection; here, in his favorite room, favorite chair, with his favorite drink in hand - in this moment, his life was as perfect as it had ever been.

Of course, he hadn't actually created any of the images. He had merely gathered them together, and given them the preparation he had seen them worthy of. Preparation to be displayed; to be gazed upon by his lone eyes, in tranquil moments like these...

This preparation had been much more trouble than one might guess.

Skulls and eyeballs; shamrocks and celtic crosses; crucifixes; pentacles and pentagrams. Rings of flame; swaths of swirling black lines, tapering to thornlike spikes. Beautiful women and leering demons. A variety of animals, the majority being serpents and lizards. Fish and dragons. Yin-yangs, in numerous styles and variations. Abstract shapes and unplaceable symbols. Fire and water. Stylized eyes, copied from pharaoh's tombs. Even an occassional swastika.

All were hand-drawn originals. But there was no single theme, or even artist, connecting all of these images. In most cases, he couldn't even name the artist.

But all had one thing in common: none were in any medium but ink, injected into the flayed skin of human beings.

Assembling this collection had required more than frequenting art auctions, or rooting through antique stores.

One image depicted a heart with a key-hole in its center, as if to imply that it held something worth burglarizing. Another, a colorful treefrog; not large, about the size of a dinner-roll.

There was yet another amorphous black design, but this one was punctuated at its center by bleary eyeballs, each with a double-iris. Another depicted a thorny red heart, more the physical organ than the icon of love. Enwrapping it was a scroll, enscribed with a disparate mix of words: "Creative"; "Loyal"; "Ambition"; "Pride". Elsewhere, a hissing rattlesnake, its gaze burning with crimson fire, laced itself through the eye sockets of a jawless human skull. Below this was the catch-phrase of a defunct heavy metal band: "THE TREND IS DEAD"

One of his oldest pieces, it still amused him to read those your case, he thought, I'd have to agree

Not all of the pictures had accompanying inscriptions, but then, not all of the inscriptions were matched with images, either. Some were simply quotes, or names, or snippets of nonsense. "KATE". "You can't see the demon's eyes". "The Pen is mightier than the Sword."

Funny how the fillet-knife never seemed to get any recognition, even if it had had the final say that time.

Zodiac symbolism and images were heavily represented, as were numbers. One wall, still mostly bare, sported the octagonal face of a simple wooden clock at its center; surrounding it, at the appropriate points, were multiple renditions of the numbers one through twelve, each a small fleshy square in a little wooden frame, sealed behind the usual layer of glass. Each appeared at least once in roman numerals, and again in plain digits. "13" and "XIII" were also numerous, in their own row along the top of the wall, above the clock and its radiating cluster.

To one side of this, the number "44" was accompanied by kanji script and the image of a Japanese sword. He had no more reliable means of translating these characters than any average monolingual westerner. "Another stupid American got a tattoo he can't read," he thought to himself. It was as good a guess as any. Probably better than most.

In a way, they were all pretty inane, even saddening. So many of their former owners had turned to them as a source of identity. People were always trying to figure out who they were, and the things they resorted to were depressing.

This by itself was enough to convince him that by preserving these images in his collection, he had liberated them to a higher purpose. Beauty may exist in the eye of the beholder; but sometimes, art needed the chance to simply exist for its own sake, and not be relegated to the roll of a supporting column, propping up the frail ego of another lost "individual."

Some images were grouped by a particular theme - often an especially popular one that rendered them particularly generic. There was a cluster of "tramp-stamps," the lower back markings that young (and sometimes not-so-young) women used to draw attention, literally marking themselves as being "legal" for certain sundry professions. Most were at least vaguely sensuous, but at least one was merely strange: smaller than the rest, it depicted a crescent moon with an odd grin upon its cartoonish face. The fact that it had been taken from a small, effeminate male made it all the weirder.

At best, people could be bemusing creatures, in their transitory way. But in his earliest days as a collector, he had learned that it was usually better to leave an intriguing mystery alone, rather than learn a truth that was almost always disappointingly simple-minded. So rather than ask a subject too many questions, he usually "cut to the chase," as it were.

Not that most of their thoughts were unguessable; on the contrary, he probably understood their subconscious workings better than they did. Rationalizations aside, most people were trying to get away from themselves, to become something else, something special, something more than what they were, by any means possible - and the more tangible, the better. A construction worker with a GED, struck by the unsettling question of "am I really bad-ass?", could look down his shirt, admire the flaming goat-skull on his chest, and breathe a sigh of relief. A freckled nobody could get a shamrock or celtic design, and at least be sure of the fact that they were Irish. A heavy-set girl could go into a parlor, and come out transformed - into a heavy-set girl, with permanent wings upon her shoulderblades. Mission accomplished.

The room's muted light flickered for a moment. It came from four guttering lamps that hung upon the walls; unlike the artwork, these were from an antique store. They had once burned oil, refined from the fat of whales.

Sometimes, it amused him to find a piece unworth the trouble of collecting, and ask its owner what it "meant." The cruder and more simplistic, the more amusingly complex their explanation would be. And most of them certainly loved to talk.

In any case, this dubious arform was outgrowing itself. Soon the majority of this country's population would have some

"tatt" or another; what had started as a means of distinguishing oneself from the undecorated masses was now indeed a full-fledged trend. At this rate, there would be a place in the sideshows for people like himself, whose skin remained unpierced and unmarked.

He took another sip, and sighed wistfully. If only to posess pieces with true meaning behind them! Ones in which the man - or woman - "made the artwork," rather than more of this; these generic images, intended to make something out of nobody. Such would be worth the trouble of hunting for; meanwhile, he couldn't help but think that anyone who sought validation through these diverse, yet mostly unimaginative images, invariably lacked intelligence - and thus made easy prey.

It had been six years now, and he'd yet to be disproven, much less discovered.

Disgust and contempt welled up in him, a bitter taste at the back of his mouth, and he realized that his moment of perfection had passed.