Act Fifteen - Interlude: Dance Lessons

    ‘Norman said that it would be better to get in some actual practice, so I accepted. I didn’t think it would be as difficult as it was to follow the steps I had been studying, but it was very hard. I almost didn’t hear when Roger came down to check on our whereabouts, but only almost. I wonder what is causing my senses to become so dull.’

    I suppose I should’ve expected it, but I didn’t. I was gone on an errand about my latest case, and when I got back I found my dinner waiting on the table for me. The house, for the most part, was silent, and I wondered where Norman and Dorothy could be. Norman, I granted, could be down fixing Big O, but Dorothy…

    Well, she could be helping, I supposed. It seemed a long shot, but it was worth a try.

    Instead of sitting down to dinner, I made my way towards the elevator, to go and look for the two of them.

    I stopped before I got halfway to it, hearing music faintly in the silence of the house. I traced it to its source, and found myself heading down a staircase I rarely use.

    The house, which belonged to my parents, was originally intended as a place where my mother could host parties, since she and my father were rather rich, and she seemed to enjoy it. Or so I believe that I recall correctly.

    The memory is a funny thing, it can, at times, play tricks on you, and so I am not entirely sure I remember my parents correctly or not.

    I followed the music down the stairway and found myself in a dark corridor, standing before a set of double doors I don’t recall ever having opened, or at least not in many, many years. The left door was slightly ajar, and it was from this crack, this gap of maybe an inch or so that the music drifted. I stepped up to the door and glanced inside.

    Furniture, covered in sheets, filled the outlying space. A ballroom that is unused is very valuable storage space, or at the very least a very practical storage space. The chandelier overhead was lit dimly, and a record player sat on top of one of the covered pieces of furniture.

    And in what appeared to be a carefully cleared space, because the marble floor had not a single scratch or scuff mark from a furniture leg on it, Dorothy and Norman were dancing. I watched, entranced, for a few moments by the graceful movement of android and butler, and thought to myself that this was it.

    This was the cut above that made Dorothy special, it is why I fought my way past the muscle to hear her sing in the Nightingale club when he wouldn’t let me in, and why I went to such lengths to protect her when I could’ve allowed Beck to take her. This was what made me call her more than ‘just an android’ and was why I wouldn’t be able to treat her like one any longer.

    And then, almost as though she was trying to prove her humanity, she accidentally stepped on Norman’s foot. It was a gentle pressure, I’m sure, and he smiled down on her as they stopped dancing and she went over, silently, where she had mis-remembered the step she had put on his toe. I took that as my cue to slip away, and see to eating dinner.

***