Evan rolled back and forth on his heels. Then he jigged his leg and stuck his finger into his nose. Eventually, he sat next to her on the carpet and watched her nimble fingers do their work.

Time rolled on. Evan’s stomach rumbled. Aster’s phone pinged with notifications. And finally, with a triumphant flourish, she held up the tape. “Finished.” She smiled at him. “Come on, then. Let’s see if it works.”

Evan bounced on the balls of his feet, grinning at his sister. “Thank you,” he said, throwing his arms around her. Aster blushed and hugged him back. It felt good to do something nice for her brother for a change. He handed her the borrowed Walkman and she slid in the cassette. They huddled together, each claiming an earphone. Aster winked at him and pressed PLAY.

A high-pitched voice was singing about eagles flying higher and higher and something called St. Elmo’s fire. The voice then adopted the over-the-top drawl of a radio DJ, introducing the next song. Both children started to laugh. The voice was an excellent mimic.

And then it stopped.

If someone had filmed that very moment—in the half-light of a summer holiday teatime in an ordinary bedroom on a not-so-ordinary street, two heads bent together—they would have witnessed the anticipation on both young faces dim into darkness.

At first, the hum and crackle of recorded silence, a sense of waiting for something important to happen, of drawing in breath and holding it.

And then a voice, whispering, urgent, the words tumbling out so quickly it was almost impossible to pick out the distinctions between letters, the vowels and consonants running together to form a plea, yearning down the tunnel of the years. helpmehelpmehelpmehelpmehelpmehelpme

Sister and brother looked at each other, half laughing, waiting for the voice to say it was all a joke. But then a clatter and scrape, like a cassette recorder being hastily dropped and pushed out of sight. The sound of somebody new climbing a ladder. And then the voice was crying, and apologizing over and over again.

A muffled thump, as if something heavy—a body, thought Aster—was hitting the floor, a shift in volume, the voice pressing closer to them, begging for whoever it was to stop. It was all locked inside their heads, the sound of fear saturating everything, past and present.

Evan clung to his sister, his eyes screwed shut, his fingers trembling like dead leaves in the breath of the wind.

Aster tugged at the headphones, but the wires were tangled, wrapped around each other, and she was not quick enough to save her brother from the climax of the recording, played out by a macabre conductor of death, saving the greatest symphony until the last.