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  It was exactly as I'd remembered from all those years before. The papers were gone now and the books all up on the shelves, but the prints and paintings still hung the walls and the leather chair still sat behind the huge wooden desk, just as the old man had left it.

  Maria was behind the desk, rummaging in the drawers, but I found I was reluctant to enter the room. It felt as though I'd be stepping on someone's grave to do so, tampering with the dead. I hung back at the door, waiting for her to finish.

  She came up smiling, a small iron key in her hand, and bounced back to where I stood. Of course, I realized, the old man would always have kept a spare.

  Finally, it was time for Maria to go of to bed and time for me to head back home. We said our tearful goodbye at the back door, Maria making me promise to visit again, and I answered with all sincerity that I would as soon as I could. I got back in the car and drove the hour north to home.

  Back in Austin I found things just as I'd left them a few days before. Hot, dark, and empty of food. I left the cardboard box with the book and my grandfather's things by the door, tossed my suitcase over onto the couch, and headed for the kitchen. There, on the table where I'd left it, was the wooden case, the other half of my inheritance, the remainder of my grandfather's life's work. Pulling the iron key from my pocket, I sat down at the table and pulled the case over in front of me.

  The key turned easily in the lock, oiled to perfection, which hardly surprised me. My grandfather always insisted everything in the house be in perfect working order, no matter how old. Or how young, for that matter, considering how he had worked my brother and me. But that was long ago, and all sins forgotten.

  I hesitated before opening the case, wondering what might be inside and almost afraid to find out. Finally, curiosity got the better of me, and I carefully lifted the lid up.

  There, in precisely shaped indentions on black velvet, sat twin .45 Colt automatics, with a small envelope resting on top. The pistols, like the lock, looked oiled and flawless, as new as they'd looked fifty years before. Fifty years before, I realized, when my grandfather had used them, fighting crime and injustice under the hood of the Black Hand. It was all true, every word of it.

  With shaking hands, I lifted up the envelope and managed to get it open. There was a single sheet of parchment paper inside, the close lines of my grandfather's hand filling one page.

  To my beloved grandson, Spencer Tracy Finch,

  These were to have been my gift to you on the occasion of your graduation from high school and entry into the world of adults. I had anticipated, and hoped, that you would choose to follow in my footsteps, and in the footsteps of my ancestors, and take up the mantle of the Black Hand. If you have opened this article prior to your other inheritance, the contents of that box should adequately explain what I mean, and what significance that name has had for our family.

  I have said that I had hoped you would follow in my footsteps, and I am a foolish enough old man that when you chose your own road in life I allowed myself to feel slighted by it. To feel that you had somehow betrayed me. I apologize for that, and regret now that we have not been closer over the years. However, I have always kept a watchful eye on your progress, both those years you spent with the thief in Louisiana (whom I know all too well; ask him about San Francisco in the Spring of 1949), and your later efforts as a journalist throughout these United States. I want you to know that I could not have been prouder of you, even had you taken on the mantle I wore so many years ago. Through your actions, by following the path of your choosing, you have proven to me that you are upholding, in your own way, the high ideals to which our family has always dedicated itself, and that the Taylor family line is proudly carried forward in you.

  I regret, my grandson, that I am not able to tell you these things myself, but I am an old man, too set in my ways, and not long for this world. I will be gone by the time you read these words, so I ask only this. Continue to strive, always strive, for what is good and best, and remember me.

  Yours, Richmond Taylor, the Black Hand

  It was some time later that I put the paper down, and sometime after that when I climbed out of the chair and crossed the room. My most cherished angers, my long-held petty grievances, had all been taken from me, and in their place was an overwhelming feeling of loss. And, inexplicably, of satisfaction and accomplishment. I was confused, but then realized that for the first time in a long time, if not ever, I was proud of myself. The validation from my grandfather I had never thought I wanted or needed, when finally given, suddenly put my whole life in another perspective.

  I stood thinking for a long while, standing still in the kitchen, before I went back to the living room to get the cardboard box. Returning to the kitchen, I laid out the book I had been given by the angel, and the papers of my grandfather, and started to work.

  I turned to the blank pages in the back of the book, where the last member of the Cult of the Lightbringer had left off, before the book had been lost to pirates and found by my seafaring greatgrandmother many times removed. The history of the Order of the Black Hand ended there, and that's where I would begin. The papers and articles I would staple in as I went.

  I picked up my pen, and wrote, "My brother and I once met at a bar…"

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Perhaps more than any of my other books, this one in particular would not have been possible without the love, support, and encouragement of my wife, partner, and friend, Allison Baker.

  I am also endlessly grateful to Mark Finn, Matthew Sturges, and Bill Willingham, who helped bring this story into focus.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Chris Roberson's books include the novels Here, There & Everywhere, The Voyage of Night Shining White, Paragaea: A Planetary Romance, Set the Seas on Fire, End of the Century, Iron Jaw and Hummingbird, The Dragon's Nine Sons and Three Unbroken, and the comicbook mini-series Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love. His short stories have appeared in such magazines as Asimov's Science Fiction, PostScripts, and Subterranean. Along with his business partner and spouse Allison Baker, he is the publisher of MonkeyBrain Books, an independent publishing house specializing in genre fiction and non-fiction genre studies.

  He has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award four times – twice for publishing, and once each for writing and editing – twice a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and three times for the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Short Form (winning in 2004 with his story "O One").

  More recently Chris has been writing the acclaimed comic book, I Zombie. He lives, with wife and daughter, in Austin, Texas. Read more of his work or just find out what he thinks at chrisroberson.net.

  Extras...

  AUTHOR'S NOTES

  Readers of my previous novels may recall that I am the type of person who feels cheated when "The End" are the last words in a book, and who never buys a DVD if the "Special Features" are nothing more than theatrical trailers. While I feel that stories should explain themselves, I nevertheless like a little extra material to explore when I finish the story itself, a bit of behind-the-scenes business that I can dig into after the credits roll.

  With that in mind, I offer the following notes.

  On the Text

  A somewhat different version of this novel was originally published under the title Voices of Thunder in a print-on-demand edition by Clockwork Storybook, a short-lived writers' collective in Texas. The present volume represents the author's preferred text.

  On the Origins of BOOK OF SECRETS

  Like my novel End of the Century, with which it shares more than a few points of connection, this story is one that lived in my head for years. The earliest notes on the characters and ideas can be found in notebooks dating back more than twenty years, to when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin. I tinkered with the various pieces for years, and by the spring of 1993 I had figured out the basic plot, worked up the back-stories of the various characters, and sketched
in the rough outline of the secret history of the world that Spencer's searches would gradually reveal. I did research for the next year or two, filling notebook after notebook with entries on secret societies, mythologies, and other historical minutiae.

  By the time I turned twenty-five in 1995, I had the whole story mapped out. But while I had the plot figured out, I didn't yet have the structure. But more importantly, I knew I wasn't yet a good enough writer to tell the story I wanted to tell. I started writing the novel at least a half-dozen times, but each time was defeated by it.

  By the decade's end I was almost ready. As part of the Clockwork Storybook writers' group, I had the constant encouragement (and more importantly, criticism) of the other members – Mark Finn, Matthew Sturges and Bill Willingham – to help me improve my craft. And inspired by Michael Moorcock's Fabulous Harbours, I'd finally worked out the structure that the story demanded.

  The version of the story that was published as Voices of Thunder was not a first draft – or even a fifteenth – but still in many ways I consider it an unfinished work, bread that wasn't yet fully baked. After a brief life as a print-on-demand edition (that sold only a handful of copies), I continued to tinker with the manuscript, revising it again and again over the years since. The end result is the present volume, now rechristened Book of Secrets – perhaps ironically, the title I'd originally given the story back in 1993, which is only fitting, as this is the story that I set out to tell, all those years ago.

  On the Black Hand

  The notion of a family of heroes is one that has obsessed me since childhood. Not an extended family of adventurers and explorers like the BonaventureCarmody family featured in much of my other work (the inspiration for which was found in the works of the late Philip José Farmer), but a lineage of masked avengers, a mantle passed down from one generation to the next.

  It's an idea I encountered again and again growing up – the masked avenger who carries on the work of their forebears. On the radio and in the pulps, Fran Striker's Green Hornet was the nephew of his Lone Ranger, carrying on in the then modern era the fight begun by his uncle in the Old West.

  And in the comic strips, Lee Falk's Phantom was merely the most recent in a long line of Ghosts that Walk, waging a never-ending war against piracy. In the comics, Gray Morrow's re-envisioning of the Black Hood was the modern-day scion of a similar heroic tradition, while Tim Truman's Prowler was a retired hero who spent his twilight years training his successor. Matt Wagner's Grendel was a dark inversion of the model, a masked avenger like the others but far from a hero, and not merely a mantle passed from generation to generation but a demonic spirit of aggression that possesses one host after another.

  The work of these talented writers and artists was originally responsible for planting the seed in my fevered young brain that eventually became the Taylor family and the mantle of the Black Hand, and so it is with humble thanks that the present volume is dedicated to them.

  Chris Roberson

  Austin, TX, USA

  CHRIS ROBERSON IN CONVERSATION

  Writing is said to be something that people are afflicted with rather than gifted and that it's something you have to do rather than want. What is your opinion of this statement and how true is it to you?

  I've always said that anyone who can stop writing should – if you're really a writer, you don't have a choice in the matter. I'm certainly one of those who has written compulsively since childhood, and I couldn't stop if I wanted to. Luckily, I love writing, so it's not any kind of burden. But definitely, even if no one was paying me to write, I'd still be doing it.

  When did you realise that you wanted to be a writer?

  Very early on. I wrote my first "novel" when I was nine years old. It ran to 426 words on three and a half handwritten pages, and it was entitled Space Crash. And it in no way resembled Star Wars, which had been released two years before. I kept writing through high school, short stories and poems mostly, all of them horrible. In college I started writing novels, and just didn't stop.

  It has been said that if you can write a short story you can write anything. How true do you think this is?

  It's certainly true that the skills and discipline involved in crafting a successful short story are the basis for all good writing, and I think anyone who can write a good short story has it within them to write a good novel. Novels just take longer!

  If someone were to enter a bookshop, how would you persuade them to try your novel over someone else's and how would you define it?

  Book of Secrets is a murder mystery combined with a secret history of mankind, wrapped up in a story about a man coming to terms with his heritage. Oh, and there are gangsters, masked avengers, highwaymen, mythological beings, cat burglars, and more! I quite like the tagline cooked up by someone in the Angry Robot offices: "It's almost like Angels & Demons but with real angels and demons." It's not quite accurate, but it captures the flavor nicely.

  Who is a must-have on your bookshelf and whose latest release will find you on the bookshop's doorstep waiting for it to open?

  Anything by Alan Moore I will sit down and read the minute it appears, and deadlines be damned. Also high on my list are people like Kim Newman, Michael Moorcock, Kage Baker, Terry Pratchett, Michael Chabon, Grant Morrison, and many others.

  When you sit down to write, do you know how the story will end or do you just let the pen take you? Do you develop character profiles and outlines for your novels before writing them or do you let your ideas develop as you write?

  I outline compulsively, and write incredibly in-depth character profiles and such before ever typing word one. I keep a wiki database for all of my research and worldbuilding, a personal encyclopaedia that gets bigger and bigger as time goes on.

  My outlines are closer in some cases to extremely rough drafts, describing the content of each bit of narration and dialogue, but written quickly and without any concern over how they will read. Then, when it comes time to write, I just rewrite that outline into prose form bit by bit, and when I've rewritten the last of the outline I've got a complete story.

  What do you do to relax and what have you read recently?

  To relax I watch cartoons with my daughter, read comic books, and noodle around with writing projects other than whatever I'm supposed to be working on at the time. At the moment I'm a judge for the World Fantasy Awards, so I'm having to read everything published in 2008 that might conceivably be called fantasy.

  The most recent book I finished and enjoyed was Jeffrey Ford's The Shadow Year, which is just a tour-de-force of a writer working at the height of his powers.

  What is your guiltiest pleasure that few know about?

  I have no guilty pleasures, or rather I don't keep any of my pleasures private. I'm proud to admit to all of my strange obsessions, from kids' cartoons to puppetry to superhero comics, and so on.

  Lots of writers tend to have pets. What do you have and what are their key traits – and do they appear in your novel in certain character attributes?

  We have a cat, or rather a cat has us. But he has not yet appeared in any of my stories, at least not so far as I'm aware…

  Which character within your latest book was the most fun to write and why?

  Most likely the most fun to write was Tan Perrin, the Fagin of cat-burglars.

  How similar to your principal protagonist are you?

  Spencer Finch is very much an overly idealized self-portrait of myself at a younger age. I was never much like Finch, but I think I very much wanted to be. He is, however, much cooler than I am.

  What hobbies do you have and how do they influence your work?

  My hobby is my work. That's the real advantage of getting to do the thing you love for a living.

  Where do you get your ideas from?

  Everywhere!

  Do you ever encounter writer's block and if so how do you overcome it?

  If I get bogged down in one project, I just switch to another for a while.

 
Certain authors are renowned for writing at what many would call uncivilised times. When do you write and how do the others in your household feel about it?

  I'm very boring in this regard. I write during banker's hours, you could probably say, in the time that my daughter is away at preschool. Usually it's from nine in the morning to three in the afternoon these days.

  Sometimes pieces of music seem to influence certain scenes within novels. Do you have a soundtrack for your tale or is it a case of writing in silence with perhaps the odd musical break in-between scenes?

  I know some writers listen to music when they write to get them into the mood, but I can't manage it. I have to have silence, as complete as possible.

  What misconceptions, if any, did you have about the writing and publishing field when you were first getting started?

  I had the impression, as many writers do when starting out and meeting rejection, that the publishing industry was this giant monolithic thing that was designed to keep new writers out, a closed and hermetic system that only those with connections could enter. And I was completely wrong. It wasn't that the editors couldn't recognize my genius, it was that my stories were mostly crap. Continue to write, improve, and keep submitting, and sooner or later you'll get published.