Red Shadows Read Free Page B

Look at this drokking mess! I thought I told you to wait until we got outside!"
    Startled by the sound of a voice ahead of him, as he rounded the corner, William saw a middle-aged man berating a cringing robo-pet as it stood beside a realistically steaming pile of synthi-shit further down the corridor. The man was angry, his features flushed crimson with exasperation, but as ever what registered more intensely to William were the colours of the man's soul. To William's eyes the robo-pet's owner was surrounded by a hazy cocoon of colours made up of shifting shades of green and brown, shot through with pulsing black lines of anger.
    The exact palette of colours varied, but William had always been able to see the same cocoon around every living being. The aura, one of his doctors had called it, before trying to persuade him it was all a figment of his imagination. William preferred to call it by the same name he had given it as a child, back before he had come to understand that other people were not able to see the same things he did. The soulshadow, he had called it then. In the same way a physical object blocked out light and cast a shadow shaped in its outline on the ground beside it, so a person's soul radiated a shimmering envelope of colours that surrounded their body and revealed the outlines of their psyche: the soulshadow. It was as good a name for it as any. Certainly, William had never heard a better one.
    "Damn stupid dog," the man muttered quietly, the black lines of his soulshadow pulsing wider as he bent down to clean up after his pet. "I told the wife we should've got one that didn't produce any shit. But no, she had to insist on getting the latest model."
    Still complaining to himself, the man did not even glance up as William walked past him. It had always been the same. Ever since his childhood, William had known what it was to be ignored. Unless he did something particularly strange or noteworthy, people hardly noticed him. Even when they did, they seemed to find it difficult to remember what he looked like afterwards. I guess I must have one of those faces, he told himself from time to time. Average, unmemorable, with nothing distinctive about it to make it stand out from the crowd. Deep inside however, he suspected there was a good deal more to it. Sometimes, it was like he was invisible; as though the same gift that allowed him to see the colours of the souls around him had somehow blinded the world to his presence in equal measure.
    He had experienced it all the more intensely in the last few days, since his arrival in Mega-City One. At times, walking the pedways of the city and seeing thousands of people pass him by without even one of them pausing to look in his direction, William knew what it was to be a ghost. Not that he felt any great regret at this curious state of affairs, far from it. Given the nature of the work he had come to do in the city, the fact that its people ignored him could only be to his advantage.
    After continuing a short way down the corridor, William waited for a moment as the man with the robo-pet made his way around the corner towards the elevators. Hearing the distant chime of an elevator door opening once the man was out of sight, William turned to resume his search for the apartment of Brenda Maddens. Coming at last to the door he wanted, he looked around to make sure the corridor was empty before ringing the doorbell.
    "Who is it?" he heard a woman's voice call out from inside the apartment after a few seconds.
    "Synthi-Flora delivery," William said. Staring at the black spyhole in the centre of the door, he wondered whether she was looking at him through it as he spoke. "I got a delivery.flowers and candy for Ms Brenda Maddens in Apartment 56-C."
    "A delivery for me?" The voice on the other side of the door was suspicious, distrustful. "Who's it from?"
    "There's no name on the card," he said. "It must be from a secret admirer. You'll have to open the door. I need you to