INTRODUCTION

Toward the end of 1999, Richard Laymon called, wanting to know if I could do a story for an anthology he was editing for Cemetery Dance. He planned on calling it Bad News.

I’d known Dick for about a decade and a half then. Our only contact was at conventions (often World Fantasy) where I’d run into him, usually with his shy young daughter Kelly, and we’d hang out and talk. A gentle family man with a big, easy smile who wrote some of the bloodiest, seat-of-your-pants horror novels you’ll ever read.

I asked him what kind of story. He told me anything I wanted to write.

Anything?

Yeah—if he liked it, he’d buy it.

So I sat down and started typing...free associating at first, but then it began to take shape, becoming this weird paranoid thing that wandered around Lower Manhattan, into Queens, and back. I had no idea how to categorize it. And after rereading it for inclusion here, I can’t imagine where I came up with something as bizarre as contraction art. Sometimes I confound myself.

I sent it to Dick fully expecting him to reject it. He wanted it.

Weird guy.

Richard Laymon died fifteen months later on Valentine’s Day, 2001.

I dedicated The Haunted Air to him and Poul Anderson.

This one’s just for you, Dick.