A long, twelve-foot high concrete wall slipped past them on the right, broken only by a heavy, ornately wrought iron gate.

"That's Cowden's discouragement wall," Mark said. "Let's find a place to park."

"Yes, dear."

A few hundred feet further along, a smaller road diverged. Mark nosed into it and began to pull over to the side.

"No, not here," Vicki said. "Up ahead, behind the bushes."

"Yes, dear."

The electronic alarm system was good enough to defeat ninety-nine percent of those who might challenge it. The laser beams paralleling the top of the wall, the infrared motion detectors that covered the grounds, and the pressure-sensitive pads buried in the garden paths all conspired to slow Mark and Vicki to a walk.

The house itself, of course, was so well protected that it had practically no internal systems at all.

A single low-wattage light from the kitchen shone into the room. Mark casually scored the glass, fiddled around for a moment with his sticky things, then popped a six inch circle loose. He reached in through the hole and fastened jumper clips to a wire painted to match the wood, bypassing the window reed switch.

He twisted open the catch on the window, pulled upward, and vaulted inside.

He turned to help Vicki slither across the sill, then recoiled and gasped. On the table beside the window rested the blood-red bust of a deformed, snarling animal that had never lived outside a nightmare. Vicki looked at it briefly and rolled her eyes. She held her finger to her lips.

The pinpoint flashlights revealed a cozy living room, like many others they'd invaded late at night. Except that, scattered randomly among the normal furnishings, on the floor or on other small tables, reposed a dozen sculptures of the most hideous sensibility.

Most were frozen in screams of rage or pain. Most were animals. Some were so grotesque as to be unidentifiable. All made Mark want to shudder and turn away.

Vicki approached the smallest, a toad-like monstrosity carved from a dark-grained, highly polished wood. It leered at her, its broad, wet tongue curled around a crushed egg from which a thing even more nauseous struggled to escape.

She pulled a padded cloth from her bag, wrapped the carving in it, and put it in the bag.

Mark shook his head. He'd seen pictures of Cowden's works in the catalogs Frankie provided. Most had been bizarre, but none had been as malign as any in this room.

He swung his light around until it passed over an open door. Quietly, he crept to it and lay down. He peeped around the corner at floor level, then relaxed and stood.

A few feet down the hallway, on the opposite side, he had made out the outlines of a kitchen through another open door. The heavily carpeted hallway ran past the bottom of a stairway before disappearing around a corner.

They moved ghostly through the hallway. As they passed the stairway, Vicki gestured toward it and upward. Mark shook his head and pointed forward.

They turned the corner and came to closed doors across from each other. He opened the one on the left, while she took the one on the right. His room was absolutely bare and clean, except for the deep gouges that criss-crossed the wall paneling. The scars began at shoulder height and reached to the ceiling.

Vicki tapped him on the shoulder. Her thumb and forefinger made a circle.

They entered, leaving the door slightly ajar so that they might continue to hear the rest of the house. The room was filled with objets d'art, most as grotesque as those they'd encountered already, but larger. Three locked glass cases lined half of one wall. They displayed on black velvet dozens of jade figurines.

Mark began to relax. The job was half over.

He looked around the room, dimly illuminated by the light from the hallway. The potter's wheel in the corner, the unfinished lumps under sheets, the odd pieces of metal and stone that lay scattered about, all said that this must be Cowden's workshop. Incongruously, a huge, half-built model airplane covered a crude table that held the center of the room. The finished sculptures, several as tall as a man, made his stomach twist.

Vicki brought her lips to his ear. "Cowden must be very weird."

Mark looked at the large malachite cobra that twined up the legs of the display case nearest to them and nodded.

Then they set to work. Mark deposited his black bag in front of the case, pulled a few small instruments forth, and bent to quietly convince the lock to be his friend.

Vikki patted him on the shoulder and then wandered about the room with her bag, looking for more goodies. She fingered small pieces, putting most back down, wrapping and taking some, simply looking appraisingly at others.

She returned to watch Mark finish up on the last display case. Beside the case, mounted on the wall, a shelf supported a jumble of oddly-shaped tools and half a dozen old books. As Mark pulled up the top of the case, Vicki reached in among the tools and carefully extracted a small jade bottle, perhaps four inches high. Curving lines had been delicately incised into the body of the bottle. Eerily, the lines reminded Mark of the clawed panelling. Thick black wax sealed the stopple of the bottle.

As he unrolled a small blanket and began placing figurines in pockets sewn to it, he watched Vikki examine more closely the small objects on the shelf, keeping several, among them a couple of small distorted cylinders of silver that Mark finally admitted to himself had been fashioned in the form of broken human fingers. Last of all she opened a small leather bag and pulled out a finely crafted silver dagger. She smiled as she tested its point against the ball of her thumb.

She had set the jade bottle on the velvet while she poked around on the shelf. He picked it up and placed it inside a pocket, then rolled up the blanket and stuffed it inside his bag.

The stairway around the corner creaked faintly.

A few seconds later, a shadow dimmed the light from the hallway, then the door swung more fully open. A handsome man in his sixties stepped alertly into the room, dressed in pajamas and carrying a revolver of indistinguishable pedigree.

He grunted in dismay and took a few steps forward. His attention was focused not on the cases that held the jade figurines, but on the shelf to the side.

Behind him, Mark motioned to Vicki that it was time for them to quietly, invisibly slip away. Instead, she glided up behind Cowden and with great sincerity popped him on the head with the pry bar. Cowden fell forward bonelessly.

Vikki stood over him for a moment, her face lit with a beatific smile. She bent and retrieved Cowden's revolver. She weighed it in her hand and looked thoughtfully at Cowden's still form. Then she pointed the revolver at the back of his skull.

Mark jerked her arm back. "Dammit, let's get out of here!"

She nodded reluctantly.

Neither of them spoke on the drive back to the lake house.