After only a few sentences I felt my eyebrows climbing up my forehead. It was a manifesto of sorts, written with a clunky passion that did not translate well, except possibly into German. It spoke of expanding the frontiers of art into new areas of perception, and destroying the arbitrary line between art and life drawn by the archaic and emasculated Academy.

Even though some pioneering work had been done by Chris Burden, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, David Nebreda and others, it was time to smash the wall and move forward into the twenty-first century. And tonight, with a new piece called Jennifer's Leg, we were going to do just that.

It was all extremely passionate and idealistic, which I have always found to be a very dangerous combination, and I would have found it a little funny —except that Someone Else was finding it so, more than a little; somewhere deep in the dungeons of Castle Dexter I heard a soft and sibilant chuckle from the Dark Passenger, and that amusement, as always, heightened my senses and brought me up on point. I mean, really; the Passenger was enjoying an art exhibit?

I looked around the gallery with a different sort of awareness. The muted whispering of the people clustered by the monitors no longer seemed to be the hush of respect toward art. Now I could see an edge of disbelief and even shock in their near-silence.

I looked at Rita. She was frowning as she read, and shaking her head. “I've heard of Chris Burden, he was American,” she said. “But this other one, Schwarzkogler?” She stumbled over the name —after all, she had been studying French all this time, not German. “Oh,” she said, and began to blush. “It says he, he cut off his own—” She looked up at the people around the room, staring silently at something or other on the screens. “Oh my God,” she said.

“Maybe we should go,” I suggested, as my inner friend's amusement climbed steadily up the scale.

But Rita had already moved to stand in front of the first screen, and as she saw what it showed her mouth dropped open and began to twitch slightly, as if she was trying and failing to pronounce a very long and difficult word. “That's, that's, that's—” she said.

And a quick look at the screen showed that Rita was right again: it really was.

On the monitor a video clip showed a young woman dressed in an archaic stripper's costume of bangles and feathers. But instead of the kind of sexually provocative pose the outfit might have called for, she stood with one leg up on the table and, in a short and soundless loop of about fifteen seconds, she brought a whirring table saw down on her leg and threw her head back, mouth wide open in anguish. Then the clip jumped back to the start and she did the whole thing again.

“Dear God,” Rita said, shaking her head. “That's, that's some kind of trick photography. It has to be.” I was not so sure. In the first place, I had already been tipped off by the Passenger that something very interesting was going on here.