Powers of Darkness

by Hans De Roos

  The Count had left behind his ancestral home in the Carpathians to increase the evil among men. It would have been clear to him that the obstacles ahead would be many, but he would have prepared for them. Among other things, he would have brought with him boxes filled with consecrated soil; in one of them he would have rested during the journey. Some of the boxes would likely also contain immense riches, as it would cost millions to effectuate the cunning schemes the Count had in mind.

  Finally they had gathered to try and stop the Count and his evil band.

  They agreed that the young couple would take up lodging349 near Carfax to make it easier to keep an eye on what was happening there.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Count Killed

  SOON IT WAS ESTABLISHED THAT THE MASTER OF CARFAX was indeed Count Dracula, and it was also widely rumored that the asylum run by Dr. Seward was in a state of complete chaos. Van Helsing and Morris made a trip there, but Seward was not present; instead some stranger seemed to be in charge. Van Helsing asked that Morris be admitted to the hospital, as the two of them were determined to find out what was happening there. They suspected that the people at Carfax had been paying the hospital regular visits.

  The next day Van Helsing and the others met with Morris and Dr. Seward, their clothes torn from their bodies and reduced to rags. They looked more like ghosts than men. Both men had come from Carfax, where Morris had fetched the doctor who’d gone mad.350 Morris was hardly conscious and had wounds on his head. They were both admitted to another hospital on the same day Dr. Seward’s asylum burned to the ground, and no one knew how it had happened.

  The next day the companions put their heads together and decided to pay the Count a visit at Carfax, as they’d learned where he was hiding out during the day. It was already late when they arrived there. They picked the lock on the door and went into the house, where they found themselves in a large foyer. Harker saw that the walls were decorated with the same kinds of pictures as in the barbarian temple in Castle Dracula. There were rooms to both sides, but no one was around. The group went through a door straight ahead of them, entering a kind of crypt. There were lights burning inside, and on the floor they could see a stone coffin made entirely of black polished marble. But they no longer had to continue their search, for in this sarcophagus lay Count Dracula, clad in the long red cloak Harker had seen him wearing at the sacrificial ceremony under his castle.

  They all drew nearer to the coffin. Van Helsing, clenching his dagger in his hand, stared at the man in the casket—but the Count didn’t move.

  All of a sudden the Count jerked—it was sundown! He opened his eyes and sat up, looking not at Van Helsing but directly at Harker. In a flash he jumped out of the coffin and attacked him, hacking and slashing at his chest. All became dark before Harker’s eyes, but in the same moment the Count fell lifeless, swimming in his own blood: Van Helsing had stabbed him through the heart with his dagger.

  They left the body in the stone coffin, but immediately afterwards they saw the corpse began to change. It now looked as though the Count had been dead for several days. Then, nothing remained at all in the coffin, nothing but a small heap of dust.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Epilogue

  AROUND THE SAME TIME, MARQUIS CAROMAN RUBIANO—who’d recently arrived in London and had dealings with people of the highest rank—disappeared. Not long after that, Madame Saint Amand, who’d been the darling of various noblemen in London, committed suicide. And also at this time, several foreign ambassadors in London were called home.

  The cause of the fire at the asylum couldn’t be determined, but the doctor’s diary was found in his fireproof cabinet, and it was from this diary that the part of the story about Dr. Steward is derived.351 The doctor lived for a while longer after these events but never regained his sanity.

  Morris told the police that he’d killed the Count, and the matter was investigated behind closed doors, leaving him acquitted.352

  No trace was found of the Countess or the others who lived in Carfax with the Count. The house was left abandoned; when it was inspected, only the furniture remained. With the exception of three crates, the Count’s boxes were all retrieved—filled with gold coins and precious stones worth millions.

  The premises still stand deserted; however, the possibility cannot be ruled out that the Count’s followers may still be hiding somewhere.

  AFTERWORD

  by John Edgar Browning

  HANS DE ROOS’S BOOK FURTHERS THE CONVERSATION about—nay, breathes life anew into an increasingly dated subject that time and time again has proven unfailingly capable of invigorating the hearts and minds of peoples, nations, and cultures everywhere. Speak his name: Drácula. It’s a curious little three-syllable word, in particular for all it should arouse in us but doesn’t, and all it shouldn’t arouse in us but does.

  Hardly three years after Dracula’s publication, Powers of Darkness, a text that lay hidden for over a century, anticipated the myriad of ambiguous feelings we would all come to share for the Count by inviting him to leave the periphery of Bram Stoker’s original text behind and take center-stage in Valdimar Ásmundsson’s version. Powers of Darkness is even curiouser still, however. Dracula has been much like a family recipe, shared among storytellers and handed down with each passing generation who add or leave behind in its scenes a little something of itself. Even still, Powers of Darkness reads like no other text in English that has come before or since; here we find perhaps two chefs simultaneously—Bram and Valdimar—in a kitchen that is scarcely big enough to contain both of their disparate tastes. Yet, where Bram’s voice ends and Valdimar’s begins is hard to discern and, perhaps, remains the true mystery in all this.

  In this new version, there are now cats in Castle Dracula, and at one point Thomas Harker, our would-be hero, talks of bicycles, references that will leap off the page at Stoker enthusiasts. (Bram was, of course, fond of both cats and bicycles.) And there are times, as when Thomas talks of sketching the differently attired peasants in Bistritz, that one wonders if it’s Bram (a sketcher himself) that we are getting, or Valdimar. Yet, at other times, as when we read of Thomas’s encounter with the Saxon teacher in Bistritz who uses Icelandic expressions (a theme that continues throughout the text), or further still as when we learn that Valdimar’s Dracula is, among other things, an avid hunter, the two authorial voices become more distinct.

  Valdimar’s text acquires its own voice in several other ways as well. Among some of its more conspicuous differences is Thomas himself (his name aside). Thomas is in many ways more imbecilic than Bram’s Jonathan ever was, yet Valdimar’s protagonist is apt enough to carry a revolver and a pocket telescope; he even carries a flask of cognac, items which would prove indispensable to anyone unlucky enough to stay at the Castle Dracula of Valdimar’s (arguably more macabre) creation. Deep beneath its stone floors are fell scenes that, at times, combine elements of the Scholomance (Solomonanţă) from Bram’s original narrative with that of Mephistopheles and the Witches’ Carnival on the Brocken in W. G. Wills’s Faust, a play Bram helped to revise and produce and one which Valdimar would certainly have been familiar during its combined 792-performance run in England and America.

  More still, Valdimar’s version metamorphoses, and “remasculates,” Bram’s more feminized Dracula into a more brazen warrior, a man adorned in gallooned, military-esque garb who uses an old deaf-mute Hungarian woman to do all his cooking and cleaning. Valdimar’s Dracula is also an old libertine. This, combined with the material concerning the Count’s “niece,” gives us a much more free, sexually uninhibited text, one doubtless impossible under the British censors (of which Bram was a staunch proponent). The dirty old man we can only surmise in Stoker’s original text is unabashedly so in the Icelandic version. So full of character is this new Count, this politicist, that he even uses Darwinian theory to justify his place both in society and in the new world order he conspires to create.

  There are even, at ti
mes, certain moments—meta-moments, let’s call them (as when Thomas is already conveniently well-versed on the topic of vampires and openly engages the subject with Dracula when he arrives at the castle, or when Dracula remarks on such contemporary figures as Arthur Conan Doyle), in which some of the characters behave as if they are self-aware of the novel in which they are appearing, like actors in a play. Indeed, Valdimar’s text leaves much to contemplate. Who knows—perhaps Bram didn’t know about all the revisions made to his novel; he was certainly a stickler when it came to adaptations of his works—he wrote, and testified, on copyright law, and he staged dramatic readings for no less than three of his books that we know of (Dracula [1897], Miss Betty [1898], The Mystery of the Sea [1902]) to safeguard their dramatic copyright. But if we’ve learned anything about Bram, it’s that he never ceases to surprise us or keep everyone guessing, even a century after his death. We can all agree on that at least, particularly in the case of Powers of Darkness and the editorial prowess Hans shows in its pages.

  Unearthing translations like Makt Myrkranna may become the next cottage industry in Dracula scholarship and entertainment, wholly thanks to Hans and his indomitable character, something he and the indefatigable Bram had in common.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  WITHOUT THE SUPPORT OF MANY PEOPLE, THIS TRANSLATION project would not have been possible. From Dublin, Brian Showers sent me back copies of the Bram Stoker Journal with Richard Dalby’s 1995 article on Makt Myrkranna. Unnur Valgeirsdóttir at Reykjavík University Library, Sigurgeir Finnsson at the National and University Library of Iceland, Katrín Guðmundsdóttir and Einar Björn Magnússon at Reykjavík City Library all helped me to locate the first book edition of Makt Myrkranna and were so kind to send me scans of Stoker’s preface. Ásgeir Jónsson, the editor of the third Icelandic edition (2011) was of great support in learning more about Valdimar Ásmundsson’s background; together, we speculated about Dracula’s way to Iceland. Bragi Thorgrímur Ólafsson and Erlendur Már Antonsson at the National and University Library of Iceland and Gísli Baldur Róbertsson at the National Archives of Iceland informed me about the Ásmundsson letters archive.

  Petre Tutunea from Bucharest, Amanda Larasari from Jakarta and Pienette Coetzee from Stellenbosch, South Africa—all working as interns or volunteers in my studio—helped with structuring the text files and dividing them among a number of Icelandic native speakers, who assisted in improving the first translation attempts. More about this remarkable group of highly qualified helpers can be found on the next pages and on our project website www.powersofdarkness.com.

  Pienette’s sister Lounette Loubser, a young linguist and journalist, offered to come over from South Africa and spend a month with us to make the English text sound more natural. She proved to be an invaluable and indefatigable transcriber and co-editor; after she returned home by the end of June 2014, she continued to exchange editing proposals with me till the end of October 2014.

  Further research into the Icelandic idiom and the backgrounds of the story was undertaken from November 2014 till April 2016. Denyse Sturges at the Chester Fritz Library, University of North Dakota; Ole Henrik Sørensen at the Royal Library in Copenhagen; Debs Furness at UCL Library, London; and Patrick Joseph Stevens at the Fiske Icelandic Collection at Cornell University, New York, all supplied images of the copies of Makt Myrkranna in their collections. Patrick also gave insight into the correspondence of Willard Fiske with Valdimar Ásmundsson and Mark Twain.

  Information on Joseph Comyns Carr’s translation of Madame Sans-Gêne was provided by Carrie Marsh and Tanya Kato at the Claremont Colleges Library, California; Susannah Mayor at House Steward, Smallhythe and Helen Smith at the Henry Irving Foundation.

  The City of Reykjavík provided high-resolution maps of Reykjavík from the period 1876-1920.

  For an in-depth discussion about the preface of Makt Myrkranna I am greatly indebted to Andrew Wawn, Professor of Anglo-Icelandic Literature at Leeds University; Ásta Svavarsdóttir, Haukur Thorgeirsson and Ari Páll Kristinsson, Research Professors at the Arní Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, Reykjavík; Jón Karl Helgason, Professor for Icelandic Language at the University of Iceland; Gauti Kristmannsson, Professor for Translation Studies at the University of Iceland, Faculty of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies; Professor Ástráður Eysteinsson, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Reykjavík and Dean of the School of Humanities at the University of Iceland; Ragna Eyjólfsdóttir, winner of the Icelandic Children’s Book Prize 2015; translation specialists Eva Dögg Diego Thorkelsdóttir and Magnea Matthíasdóttir, and again to Ásgeir Jónsson, who provided most valuable arguments.

  My friends Dacre Stoker and John E. Browning showed an early and enthusiastic interest in this project and agreed to contribute to this book with a preface and an afterword respectively. Our agent Allison Devereux of Wolf Literary Services, New York, did a fantastic job while guiding us through the whole publication process and actively helping edit the text before and after its submission to Overlook. There, editors Allyson Rudolph and Tracy Carns were a great support in preparing the text for final publication.

  I also thank my family and the young talented people who shared my life, work and thoughts at my Munich house over the past few years—Marsha Maramis, Sarah Mawla Syihabuddin, Yofina Pradani and Dian Risna Saputri from Indonesia, Joyce Goodwill from Nigeria, Aïda el Haini from Morocco, Susannah Schaff from New York, Andreea and Teodora Vechiu from Romania, Jeewon Kim from Korea and Shiva Dehghan Pour from Teheran. Last but not least, my good friends Alida Kreutzer, Daniela Diaconescu and Magdalena Grabias were a never-failing source of support and motivation.

  ENGLISH-LANGUAGE TEAM

  LOUNETTE LOUBSER (22) is a young writer with a degree in Linguistics from Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She worked as a journalist for Shout Factory and for Glamour South Africa; now she studies entertainment journalism at the College of Media and Publishing. In June 2014, she came over to Munich to help us change the literal translation to a more fluent English. Until the end of October 2014, she supported the project as a transcriber and co-editor of the English text.

  SUSANNA SCHAFF (21) studied English and international literature at Marymount Manhattan College and publishing at Pace University, New York. In June 2015, she helped us with another round of editing.

  ALLISON DEVEREUX (29) graduated from the University of Texas and works as a literary agent at Wolf Literary Services, New York. She not only represents our book project but also engaged in giving the English text a further polish from Summer 2015 till April 2016.

  ICELANDIC-LANGUAGE TEAM

  ALDÍS BIRNA BJÖRNSDOTTIR (40) comes from Skútustaðir and studied literature and languages at the University of Iceland; she also studied at the Technical College in Akureyi. She now lives near Munich and works at an Icelandic travel agency; together with her husband and children, she regularly spends her holidays in Iceland. She already translated four English books to Icelandic and tells Icelandic fairly tales to children in the local library.

  ANJA KOKOSCHKA (30) is the only member of this team who is not a native Icelandic speaker. She studied ophthalmic optics in Munich and worked in Iceland on various horse farms, and later as an optician, for altogether eight years. After a longer stay in Bavaria, she now lives in Iceland again, in Egilsstadir.

  ARNA SIF THORGEIRSDOTTIR (23) is from Akureyi in the north of Iceland and graduated there from junior college in 2011 with language as her focus; she speaks Icelandic, English, Danish and Swedish. She studied dance in Munich at Iwanson International School of Contemporary Dance and now has returned to her hometown to instruct dance there.

  ÁSDÍS RUT GUÐMUNDSDÓTTIR (24) studied German as a Foreign Language in Siegen, Germany. She now continues with ethnology as a distance learning course offered by an Icelandic university. She has translated a book about Icelandic fairy tales to Icelandic; she is also a successful handball player. She was born in Reykjavík.

  HAFRÚN KOLBEIN
SDÓTTIR (20) comes from Húsavík on the northern coast of Iceland and went to high school in Garðabæ. She now works at a hotel in Bremen, but plans to continue her studies in Iceland. A gifted singer, she creates cover versions of English songs and puts them online. In Autumn 2014, she participated in the Voice of Germany talent contest and made it to the A-Team.

  INGIBJÖRG BRAGADÓTTIR (21) also comes from Akureyi, where she focused on social sciences. She now lives in Paris, where she studies French at the Cours de Civilisation Française de la Sorbonne and will also take up studies in journalism and communications. Since age eight, she has been training, performing and coaching other people in figure skating.

  HANS ÁGÚSTSSON (47) was born in Reykjavík but has lived in Germany for 25 years now. In Mallersdorf, Bavaria, he breeds and trains Icelandic horses and acts as a riding instructor.

  HERBERT PEDERSEN (44) is the father of Lára Kristin (see below) and assisted in deciphering the Whitby chapter—a fitting choice, as he is currently working on a ship. He studied at the University of Reykjavík and specialized in aviation business Administration at Embry-Riddle, Daytona Beach, Florida. He worked for Icelandair and at a company designing software for the retail business.

  HILDUR LOFTS (45) is another helper originating from Akureyri. She studied music at the Reykjavík Conservatory and creative writing at the University of Iceland. She lived in Sweden and later studied in Marseille. She now teaches at the Scandinavia House in New York.

  HJÖRTUR JÓNASSON (25) is from Reykjavík and studied at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi-Arabia; he graduated in September 2014. Previously, he studied chemistry at the Politecnico di Milano.