[ WP ] You run a tattoo parlor . Every couple of weeks the same customer comes in , always requesting the same tattoo - an additional tally mark on an ever-growing cluster of tally marks .

The tallies... they're all different. Inked in by hundreds, if not thousands, of other tattoo artists all over the ages. 
 
 His skin is almost the whole humanity's history of inking - I remember, when I first saw it, I could n't believe my eyes. 
 
 There's scraggly tiny lines, almost like scarring, from the ancient Hellas itself. Curved Maori scratches and dark-blue, fading streaks from the Soviet gulags. There's the scroodgy prison marks - like the bars, orderly army-print 1's and the intricate Hell Angel criss-crosses. Every part of the body, except for hands, neck and head... all kept under the wraps. 
 
 I would probably have never learned the story behind them. Not that we had n't speculated with the guys whenever we could. Spook - that's how we called him, even though he called himself simply Fred - appeared in our parlor just a year ago, and since then, returned every two weeks or so without fault, to get a new mark inked into his pale, clammy skin. 
 
 The theories ran wild, as you can guess. The most popular was that Spook had been some sort of hitman, a hired killer juiced right out of a pulp novel or film. He had n't looked the part, being a scrawny, tired-looking dude in his 40s, packed into faded tracksuits no matter the time of the year or the whimsies of Portland weather. Probably Eastern European, for there was a slight, gagging accent to his speech. Polite, smiling, quiet. But the look... there was the look of a person who does n't talk shit when he could shut someone up forever. 
 
 Besides, it was logical, was n't it? The gangs have teardrops, crosses, stars. There's tattoo monikers for every crooked soul under the sun to show off in prison their grisly feats. MS 13, the Aryan Nation, Crips, you name it, and my job is n't to ask or to judge. There had been an element of disbelief, of course. If one tried to count all of them, say, a human life for every tally, it would appear that Spook had killed in tens of thousands, if not more. 
 
 That was simply not possible. 
 
 Well, another thing was not possible, at least in theory - my ex-girlfriends new boyfriend, a wannabe rocker straight out of jail for pushing meth, knifed me in the alley behind the parlor as I was fumbling with the car keys. It should n't have happened, but it did, and after two jabs in the kidney, lying near my car and rapidly dying, I began to accept the bitter truth that unlikely things do, unfortunately, have a place in the order of things. 
 
 Not that I agreed with it. 
 
 `` Hey! Hey Mike, buddy! No, no - do n't sleep, not yet'', cold hands slapped my face, and I felt my body maneuvered, propped up by the side of my Chevy. 
 
 Spook - a soft blur under the dim, rusted glow of the overhead light. Right... 12 days since his last visit, came to get another tally. I blinked, and he came into focus, face scrunched in worry. And a syringe in his hand. 
 
 `` Mike, I need your permission. Do you understand what I'm saying? I ca n't do this if you do n't explicitly let me.'' 
 
 Permission? 
 
 `` I can save you, Mike'', the needle on the syringe cast a halo around it, hurting my eyes more than the mortal wound in my back. Why ca n't he just call an ambulance? Was Spook really a doctor? And - inappropriate thought on one's deathbead - were the tally marks really patients he could n't save? 
 
 I do n't remember what I told him that night. I must have agreed, because he rammed that thing right in my elbow, and held me tight, kneeling in the mud as I convulsed in the coming death throes. 
 
 I... survived. Both the attack and Spook's treatment, though Fred later explained that the rate of success is usually extremely low, and that I was lucky he had a syringe on him, a leftover from his latest hunt, kept in the pocket. 
 
 More importantly, now I know about the tally marks. 
 
 `` The *Yav'* revere the sanctity of human life. We are not the lawless *Nav'* or the enlightened *Prav'*. We struggle, and we break down under the weight of our nature'', he explained as I sweated and shook through a delirious, week-long fever, drenching the mattress with all sorts of bodily fluids as my body re-adjusted after the injury. `` I was among the first to decide, that with such little difference between us, in the end, we ca n't just be what we are. We have to honor our quarry''. 
 
 Fred explained, that he remembers every single one of them. Every mark has a face behind it, a life snuffed out. We, the other artists at Inkology, were n't that far off about Spook. We just did n't know about the genuine sympathy behind it, about the compassion and all-consuming guilt. 
 
 It had n't been surprising, that as I got better, Fred offered me to join the *Yav'* way. To honor, revere and control. Keep in check, register within the state *Prav'* representative, and more importantly, learn to remember the faces. Take, but not mindlessly. 
 
 Fred's tallies are all different, a testament for centuries of his appetite running amok. I think... I think I'll rather leave that a blank slate. My skin is inked enough as it is. 
 
 And, you see, the hunger is constant, and if I had n't bothered to mark my skin for every chicken leg or burger I ate in my life, I doubt that I'm going to start now. 
 
 The memories I'm about to collect are n't looking up to be keepers in flesh. 
 

