Every evening, at precisely the same time, the recording played. Just as the last light drained from the sky and the first stars appeared in the black ink sky, Mabel would hear her mother’s voice.

“Hide, they are here.”

The words, blurred by years of static, still carried her mother’s unmistakable voice, gentle, firm, and utterly commanding. Though Mabel had not seen her mother in eighteen years, she obeyed that command as faithfully as ever.

At the sound of the recording, she would climb into the cupboard beneath the stairs and squeeze herself in. It had been easier as a child, now the small space pressed against her shoulders and knees. Still, she bolted the door from inside and waited silently, until the morning birds sang their gentle notes to announce it was safe to exit.

Daylight brought its own ritual. She swept the floors, fetched water from the well, and tended the small vegetable patch her mother had planted long ago. She spoke to no one, for there was no one to speak to. Her mother had chosen this place for its isolation, and Mabel had come to understand that solitude was the price of survival.

Sometimes, as she paused in her work, she would look out across the endless horizon and wonder if anyone else survived. But the world beyond her boundary was a one she had never experience and was easily dismissed.

On her twenty-fifth birthday, Mabel sat at the kitchen table, weighed down by loneliness. She reached for the cassette recorder that had sat for years on the shelf by the sink, her mother’s voice trapped inside it like a spell all these years, and placed it in front of her.

She turned the tape over, pressed the worn red button, and spoke softly.
“Hello, Mama. It’s Mabel. I’m still doing everything you showed me.”

Her voice trembled, and she blinked back tears.
“I miss you, Mama,” she whispered, as if the words might somehow travel through the static and find her.

When she stopped, she removed the tape and wound it backward with her finger, the rewind button had broken long ago. She pressed play.

Nothing.

No static. No voice. Only silence.

Confused, she flipped the tape again, expecting her mother’s familiar warning. Still nothing. The recorder, once so alive, sat mute before her. Only now did she notice that the small red light on the machine, once a steady, blinking pulse was dead.

She stared at it as the evening light faded and the room grew colder around her.

Then, at exactly eight-thirty, came the familiar click.

“Hide, they are here.”

Mabel froze.

Her mother’s voice, clear, calm, and alive echoed through the room. But the recorder remained lifeless. The tape did not move. The light did not glow. The words seemed to seep from the air itself, low and certain, as if the walls were speaking.

“Mama?” she whispered.

No reply.

She thought of the cupboard under the stairs, the dust, the dark, the countless nights she’d spent waiting for dawn. She had always obeyed, hidden as she was told. But in all those years, she had never once seen them.

She pressed play again. Only silence.

This time, she didn’t move toward the cupboard.

Instead, she walked to the window. Outside, the land stretched endlessly beneath the stars. No distant lights flickered, no life stirred. The world was vast, and utterly empty.

She waited for her mother’s voice to return, to tell her what to do next.  But it didn’t.

And in that silence, Mabel finally realised, her mother had never told her what to do if they didn’t come.