Free Passing Through the Flame by Norman Spinrad Page B

chaparral around the house had not been replaced by flat lawn, formal hedges, and puke-plastic cedars. Creepy, but the place had character.
    He pulled into the parking lot behind a big boat of a black Rolls; behind his Rambler, a red Italian sports car about a foot high and twenty feet long snarled and burbled angrily in low gear. Velva sighed, fidgeted in her seat, adjusted her dress, and looked uptight. Paul felt as if he were driving a garbage truck.
    “Don’t worry, Velva,” he said. “Nobody important is going to see what we drove up in.” She gave him a nervous smile.
    The parking lot was well down the slope of the hill from the house, in a depression that looked like an artificially widened gully. It was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence heavily overgrown with ivy; the ridgeline between the parking lot and the house was planted with a narrowly spaced line of shaggy pines. From the house, the unseemliness of the parking lot would be virtually invisible. More points for Jango Beck.
    He parked the Rambler between a Cadillac and a Mercedes in a nearly full part of the lot, so that the fewest possible people would see them getting out of it. So as to be kind to Velva. Sure, that’s it, I’m being considerate of Velva. Sure I am. Whatever, the maneuver was successful: when they got out of the car, there was nobody in their part of the lot at all.
    “Are you happy, Velva? No one saw that you drove up in a pumpkin.” But she was already walking toward the brightly colored flock at the far end of the lot, a glazed look on her face. Paul had to trot a couple of steps to catch up.
    They melted easily into the crowd of people walking out of the parking lot, and quite a crowd it was, too. Paul recognized any number of minor-league actors and actresses; a brace of rock stars; Harry Crews, head of production at BRG; Peter Fonda; John Horst, president of EPI; and a vaguely familiar-looking guy who might be either Sonny Barger or Dennis Hopper in a new incarnation. The people he didn’t recognize had the same insouciance as those he did, with the exception of a few odd types—three forthright bikers, two tall girls who seemed to be either Las Vegas hookers or LA transvestites, three very black couples in afros, dashikis, and contemptuous sneers. People who had gotten into this alien reality by the same chance as Velva and himself.
    A wide flagstone walk led out of the parking lot up toward the house at a fairly steep incline. It was something over a hundred yards long, and stone benches were set out along both sides at about ten-yard intervals. Behind each bench was a weathered-bronze lamppost ending in a genuine gaslight. Both sides of the walk were densely overgrown with unkempt, tangled chaparral: spiky leaves, gnarled bushes, dry cactus stalks, amoeboid morning-glory vines, prickly-pear patches, all trying to engulf each other. The flickering gaslight created illusions of motion, making the vegetation seem like one great amorphous monster, like something out of an old science-fiction movie, a living glob composed entirely of tentacles, pseudopods, claws, and sucking mouths filled with teeth. Although the climb was long and steep and many of the Beautiful People making it were middle-aged, not a single stone bench was occupied. No one wanted the Vegetable Monster breathing over his shoulder.
    Paul loved the effect.
    The walk emerged from the foliage onto a short greensward in front of the house; the surrounding walls of chaparral made it seem like, a small clearing in an endless wilderness.
    The house itself looked a lot like a ruin half-reclaimed by the jungle. Wide flagstone steps led up to a narrow covered porch which ran the entire length of the house. There was a big Georgian-style doorway in the center of the housefront, flanked by five large windows on either side. Except for the porch, the door, and the windows, the house was entirely overgrown with ivy and morning-glory vines. There seemed to be three tiers of