He jotted in his notebook, and I could practically taste his Magic swirling around. The sound of old, yellowing pages flipping, the musty smell of old books. It swept the icky feeling of the grimoire from me. He shook his head. “No one’s touched this book in many years.”
I nodded. “I’m inclined to leave it that way.”
Vern nodded and gingerly picked up the book to carry it to the back room. He locked the door behind him.
In the meantime, Max and I crowded around the computer. “So what about this other one …?” Max asked slowly.
Liber Autumnusdidn’t yield any searches, but the translation, The Book of Autumn, got a few hits.
The first one was on an old forum site that looked like it’d been coded in the early HTML days. It was called the Dawn Underground, and it seemed like the sort of website for people who didn’t believe we’d really landed on the moon. I clicked away.
“What are you doing? Go back,” Max urged.
“Why? It’s just going to be a bunch of nutsos.”
Not only were real books of Magic dangerous—if you could find any—but so were the people looking for them. We’d been warned from our very first day at Seinford and Brown of people who not only believed in the existence of Magic, but were obsessed with it; if they discovered you could use it, they would do anything to get you to teach them.
“That’s exactly what we need right now. People who’re obsessed. People who are crazy in their pursuit of it. This forum is exactly the sort of place we need to be.”
Under the site’s title was a short description, “Everything You Might Ever Want to Know Pertaining tothe Book of Autumn.”
I hovered over the hyperlink, which took me to a short introductory page.
The Book of Autumn, believed to be one of the last alchemical and Magical texts to come out of the Hellenistic period*, was believed to be a part of the Magical Papyri. (Not to be confused with the Hermeticus Corpi, of which no connection has been found.) Although there is plenty of evidence pointing definitively to its existence, as well as known references to the Book in the Emerald Tablet, which you can read more abouthere,all copies are at present missing. This site is dedicated to the discovery of any copies of the Book of Autumn still in existence, in either part or whole.
“No copies in existence … Max, they’re looking for copies, anywhere …”
“And if Dani was trying to tell us about a book hunted to near extinction—”
Something tingled in my fingers, excitement bloomed in my chest. “Max,” I nearly whispered, “what if this is it? The book that Dani was pointing us to?”
And maybe, inside this book, we would find the key to unlocking whatever had happened to her.
Below the introductory note, userCiceroisdead490had put together a rough timeline of discoveries pertaining to the Book of Autumn.
3rd–4thCentury BCE, Est. Written:Author???
3rdCentury CE, Referenced in Iamblichus’s*On the mysteries:“Virtus dei autumnus” (Some disagreement regarding translation)
10thCentury, Referenced inGhâyat al-Hakîm fi’l-sihr:“Autumnus”
1542, Rome, Sanctioned in book burnings list.
2003, Sighting in Harvard Bookshop:This information has not been verified. Have a tip? Know something we don’t? Contact a mod.
Then, in bold red letters near the bottom of the page:
UPDATE—1745.
In 1745, it was obtained by a rare-books dealer in Turkey, after having been catalogued on a ship’s manifest. There was a picture of the manifest, written on old, curling parchment, the ink fading but still legible. Beneath the image, the translation:
One stack of books: Philologia sacra, The Life and Histories of the Prophet Mulutak, Flora and Fauna of the New World, and Liber Autumnus.
The more I looked through the forum, the more intrigued I became by the mystery surrounding this book.
“It seems to be an enigma,” wrote one researcher in a news article from 1995. “No one knows who the author is, and I’ve barely found anyone in my studies of historical records who’s even heard of it. Yet there are references to it throughout history, and not just from ancient history either, but from as recent as the eighteenth century. We’re talking an influence spanning thousands of years. This leads me to believe, unequivocally, that it does exist, it has to exist, and that the book’s simply been passed down secretly through the ages. The only question is … by whom? Who cares so much about this book to ensure that it exists through time? And if so, why keep it a secret now?”
There were so many theories about the book on the forum that it was hard to keep track of them all. Some people were convinced the whole thing was a hoax, that the book wasn’t even real. Others believed it was real, but that it had been burned during the Inquisition and maybe even beforehand, and no copies survived. And still others believed that it was out there somewhere, just waiting to be found and unfurl the mysteries of the world to us.
