“That’s just it,” said Circe, “no one knows who wrote it or why. It’s named after Wilfrid Voynich, a rare-book dealer from New York who discovered the book in 1912 during a buying trip to Villa Mondragone, near Rome. It was in a trunkful of rare texts. Voynich spent the rest of his life trying to decipher the language, but he never did. In fact no one ever has.”

“Maybe it’s a fake language,” suggested Rudy.

“Doubtful,” said Bug, peering at it. “It’s too orderly.”

“Can we suppose for a moment that the two remaining pages from Rasouli’s file are from the other book, the Book of Shadows?” suggested Rudy. “If so, they’re clearly written in the same language. Maybe it’s a secret language, reserved for use by members of a society.”

“Sure,” Circe agreed. “That’s the consensus of scholars of the book, but it is an incredibly complex language. In all there are one hundred and seventy thousand distinct glyphs, or written elements. About thirty of these glyphs are used repeatedly throughout the manuscript.”

“An alphabet?” said Bug.

“Probably, but no one has cracked it.”

“Where is the book now?” asked Rudy. “And can we get it?”

“It’s at Yale, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, but there’s no reason to get it. There are hundreds of Web sites devoted to the manuscript. Every page of it, including the covers, is available online.”

Bug reached up to tap one of the pages on the screen. “Wait, isn’t that a signature? I can almost read it. Jacob something something.”

“Jacobus de Tepenecz,” said Circe. “He wasn’t the author, though. More likely he owned it for a while. De Tepenecz was a seventeenth-century physician and an expert in medical plants. In 1608 he was summoned to Prague to treat Emperor Rudolf II who was suffering from severe depression and melancholia. Because of his success with the emperor, de Tepenecz was appointed Imperial Chief Distiller. Scholars believe that he was given the Voynich manuscript as either payment or as a gift by Rudolf, who was a collector of occult books and manuscripts of arcane sciences. The ownership of the book has a lot of gaps in it. We do know that when Voynich purchased it he found a letter tucked between its pages that had been written in 1665 by Dr. Johannes Marcus Marci of Bohemia, and in that letter Dr. Marci claimed that the book was written by Roger Bacon.”

“Who was—?” prompted Rudy.

“He was a Franciscan friar, philosopher, and alchemist in the thirteenth century. His nickname was ‘Doctor Mirabilis’—‘wonderful teacher.’ But … Bacon was likely born around 1220 C.E. He died in 1294, more than a century before the book was written.”

“Unless he really could do miracles,” said Bug, but they ignored him.

“What’s in the manuscript?” asked Rudy. “I see plants and diagrams…”