So, too, were the Ripleys.

"Jane?" I whispered. There was no reply, but I sensed she was near.

Ripley was white, his expression blank and menacing. His face was a mask, an act of concealment, but the currents in the room shivered with foreboding. Mary sat in a chair opposite him, her head buried in her hands, but fear leaking from every pore. She was tense, her thin body stiff and angular, legs clasped together tightly, shying away from Ripley. What struck me was how banal it looked: hate should not be this simple.

"Trollop!" he yelled, advancing towards Mary, who shrank back in the chair, but otherwise offered no emotion.

"No." Her voice was small - resigned and impassive before the fury of Ripley.

"Trollop, whore, bitch! How could you?" Still, Mary remained detached, and her very inattention seemed to inflame him further. "Answer me!" He stood before her aggressively, his arm raised. Mary looked up, a piteous vision, a woman alone and abandoned, and I was shocked by what I saw: she stared at her nemesis - a stare long, cold and indifferent, and her eyes were already dead.

"No," she repeated. Argument was futile, defence would serve only to increase his temper, and Mary was resigned. It is a sight no-one should ever be forced to witness - the moment when another human being recognises that any hope has gone and that all that remains is the end.

No-one - and in particular, not the cowering, crying offspring.

I was painfully conscious of Jane, her spirit flying beside me in agitation, helpless at the genesis of its own demise. I wanted to shield her, comfort her, but I was as powerless as Mary Ripley; as powerless, indeed, as Ripley himself, because he, too, was in the grip of a force he could not control. And so the past continued.

"And what about the child?" he yelled. He walked around the chair and for the first time I was aware of a little, pink cot, nestled behind Mary. How could I have missed it, this single beacon of innocence in a room overwhelmed by hate? A chill ran through me as I peered inside and saw the baby Aileen, wide-eyed, lying on her back with her little hands held in fists above her head: such fragile beauty amid the casual violence of the Ripley House. "Like mother, like daughter. It'll be the same. Grow up and become a harlot, just like its mother. Another bitch who'll open her legs for any passing trade!"

Ripley bent over his wife and gripped her jaw in his massive hand, squeezing her cheeks and exposing her front teeth. He shook her grimly, but still Mary Ripley, overwhelmed by a fatalistic torpor, could not respond.

"No," she said, for a third time.

Finally, Ripley lost control. He hit his wife, a single, back-handed blow across her cheek which left her head lolling, dazed, against the back of her chair. With sickening clarity, I knew exactly what was about to happen, predicting every step of Ripley's fateful walk towards the cot.

"Jane," I whispered. "Don't."

"I know," she replied. Her voice was as flat and emotionless as her mother's before her. I ached not to bear witness to the atrocity about to unfold, but the truth could not ignore me. I was part of the room, part of the moment itself, and I felt dirty, tarnished by association.

The baby Aileen cried as soon as her father picked her up, a shrill and pained wail which I can hear even now, when the lights are out and darkness claims me. Ripley was insane, his eyes displaying neither compassion nor understanding. He gripped the baby by her leg and dangled her from his outstretched hand, as though she were nothing more than a spoiled nappy. Aileen's cries were getting louder, testing Ripley's patience, and with a sudden, terrifying flash of anger he swung the baby towards her mother, her head landing hard against Mary's breast, a horrible sigh settling over the room as air was expelled from both sets of lungs. Mary tried to grab her, but Ripley pulled away, a hideous rupturing noise assaulting the air as the nascent bones in the baby's leg shattered. Her screams skidded round the room, and I didn't know whether they came from the baby or her spirit beside me, a spirit watching her own death, a voiceless voice crying a lake of tears.

"Shut up," Ripley yelled. "Shut the fuck up!" I tried to close down my mind, to spare myself what was coming, but I knew I couldn't. Ripley's hand nestled over the face of his daughter, an almost tender caress, as though wiping away her tears; except that the hand remained where it was, and after a few moments - or a lifetime - the crying stopped.

Ripley looked down at the limp body in his hands. The explosion of anger which had racked his face was gone, replaced by an expression which appeared to betray no understanding of what had just occured, and I couldn't decide whether his actions had been intentional or, indeed, whether he felt remorse. He was a cipher - a shell, a body without emotion. Mary, motionless in her chair, looked at her baby for seconds, minutes, time without end, before finally turning towards her husband. Their eyes locked, and a spark of understanding jetted between them. Mary began to scream, a continuous, crippled cry of 'no, no, no,' and the room reverberated with the echo of mourning, the sigh of death; all around was a fateful, eternal howl, and it seemed to begin and end inside each and every one of us.

I didn't know which was worse: that Jane had been forced to witness the murder, or that I was unable to comfort her. I wanted so much to be with her, to hold her, I wanted to cradle and protect her, and my impotence ate at my soul.

"I'm here, Harriet," she said. "I know you're with me." And in her sorrow, she palely cried.

Ripley had picked up the metal poker I had brandished earlier and a sickness settled over me once more. Without having seen this before, I knew in advance every blow he would inflict on his defenceless wife. He would begin with a slash across her left cheek, slicing it open from below the ear to the mouth. This would be followed by a corresponding slash across the right cheek. A blow across her ear would split her skull and another on the same spot would drive a loosened shard of bone upwards into her brain. The next twenty-four strikes, which would reduce her face to a pulp, would, in fact, be unnecessary because Mary Ripley would already be dead.

"Jane!" I screamed. Ripley positioned himself before the sobbing Mary and struck the first blow. "We have to do something!"

"We can't, it's no use." Jane's voice was dead, all hope flown.

"We must! Stop him!" I couldn't accept it. Furious at my impotence, I raged into the ether. Mary had stopped screaming by the time the second blow opened her right cheek. Her eyes were closed. Death was near.

"You can't change time, Harriet." Jane's voice quavered as she watched the third blow split open her mother's skull. I felt an emptiness deeper and more painful than anything I could have imagined possible. The sickly stench of death, of blood and lost hopes, filled the air as the fourth blow, the one which killed her, hailed down on Mary Ripley's skull. And in her moment of death I, too, felt something vital drain from me.

'You can't change time.'

Jane's words stabbed my heart. 'You can't change time.'

But I knew you could. I had proved it, earlier, when Mary Ripley's words, on first seeing me, changed from the usual script, and when I provoked a different response from Ripley. I knew I could change time.

In front of me, Ripley was frenziedly beating his wife, but just as she, too, had gained release from her suffering, I was by now oblivious: through the pain of observing these ghastly events, a glimmer of hope had emerged.

"Jane!" I shouted. "Yes we can! Yes we can!"

Around me, the walls shivered and shook and a groan emerged from their foundations. The vision of Ripley, sweating and heaving as he stood over his dead wife, began to dissolve, to decay into pitiful memory. Space collapsed in on itself, tumbling and falling, dragging this tortured moment back into history. The groans - sentinels watching over our palace of pain - gradually grew in volume until they were a constant, searing white noise. Shrieking and wailing, they reached a peak where they became a physical presence which erupted through my entire being, shattering the force which held me inside the Ripley room. Feeling as though I were being flayed alive, I burst free and exploded into a white, featureless expanse. For a second there was complete calm, an idyllic moment in which I could have been floating to heaven on an angel's back, but then I was falling, sliding, dropping through space on a collision course with time. Unable to breathe, I twisted and turned, fighting for air as I skidded through acres of emptiness. Finally, I gained control, steadying myself and gathering my thoughts. I gasped desperately, filling my lungs, but instead of sweet, fresh air, sleek fingers of flame scorched and cauterised my insides. A world of flame engulfed me as Mephisto's blaze again filled my nightmares and I fell, once more, into blackness.

On to part fifteen