INTRODUCTION

I'd originally intended to use a much shorter version of "Dat-tay-vao" as either a flashback or a prologue in The Touch, but no matter how I tried to work it in, it simply wouldn't fit. Used early on, it gave away too much of the mystery of what would be happening to Alan Bulmer in the body of the novel; inserted later, it seemed redundant. So I scrapped it.

After the novel was finished I returned to it and fleshed it out to make it a stand-alone story—a prequel to The Touch. It appeared in the March 1987 issue of Amazing Stories. The story takes place exactly nineteen years before its publication...right about the time of Reborn, another novel in the Secret History of the World. The events in Reborn trigger the Dat-tay-vao's migration to the US where it plays an important part in the Secret History, as you will see when the revised Nightworld is published down the road.