by Allen Steele
THE JEKYLL ISLAND HORROR
Foreword
The following story is not my own but someone else’s, one which was passed to me under unusual circumstances.
In March, 2008, my wife and I drove to Jekyll Island, Georgia, to attend my niece’s wedding. One of the “Golden Isles” on the Atlantic Coast just north of the Florida state line, it’s also—among other things—a wildlife sanctuary. My niece is an avid birdwatcher, so she’d been there many times, and for that reason she’d decided to be married in this place. I was looking forward to a family reunion and also a break from last days of a hard New England winter, but anticipated nothing else.
Because the bridegroom wanted to have a traditional Jewish wedding, the ceremony was scheduled to begin at sundown Saturday evening. That gave my wife and me plenty of time to wander around. I’d visited Jekyll Island several years earlier, when I was a guest author at a science fiction convention held at one of the island’s seaside resort hotels, and thus was already familiar with the place and its history. Linda had never been there before, though, so we spent the morning exploring the historic district on the mainland side, where the State of Georgia had preserved the “cottages”—small mansions, really—built at the turn of the last century by the millionaires who’d once claimed the island as their winter retreat.
These second-homes lay inside a fenced-in compound that surrounded the sprawling manse of the Jekyll Island Club. In its heyday, the Jekyll Island Club had been one of the most exclusive in America, its roster limited to one hundred members and including such notables as John Pierpont Morgan, William Rockefeller, Marshall Field, Joseph Pulitzer, William Vanderbilt, and Cyrus McCormick, Jr. Their cottages, usually echoing the Victorian architecture of the clubhouse but sometimes also modeled after Swiss chateaus and Spanish haciendas, line the white gravel footpaths that wind through the surrounding pine groves. The club had its own indoor and outdoor tennis courts, swimming pool, eighteen-hole golf course, and other luxuries, and the compound’s isolation was assured by the lack of permanent residences elsewhere on the island. Most of Jekyll Island was uninhabited when it had been the preserve of the wealthy and powerful, and because the first bridge to the mainland wasn’t built until the mid-twentieth century, the only way to get there was aboard a small private steamer from Brunswick, where the winter residents would arrive by train at the beginning of the season.
After walking around the compound for awhile, Linda and I paid a visit to the island’s only bookstore, located in what had once been the club’s private infirmary. As usual, I checked to see if any of my novels were there, and was pleasantly surprised to find a couple of them on the shelves. Since I in in the habit of signing my books when I’m on the road, I took them to the front counter, where I introduced myself to the proprietor.
This turned out to be a gentleman in his late sixties, George Hess. He was only too happy to let a visiting author autograph his books, and as I did so, Mr. Hess and I got to talking. He told me that he’d been born and raised on the island, and that his late father—who’d also written a few SF stories himself, during the pulp era—had once been the valet of a New York magazine publisher who’d joined the Jekyll Island Club in the early 1930s. His father remained on Jekyll Island after the club closed down during World War II, where he married a former servant who’d once worked at the club.
Our conversation then took an interesting turn. Mr. Hess asked if I thought there was intelligent life beyond Earth. As a science fiction writer, this is a question I’ve heard more times than I like to remember. Suppressing a sigh, I responded that, yes, I considered this to be a very strong possibility, and indeed would be surprised if there were no other races inhabiting our galaxy. But when he asked if I thought aliens had ever visited Earth, I shook my head. No, I replied, I rather doubt that; UFOs are little more than modern myths, if not outright hoaxes, and theories of so-called “ancient astronauts” are usually misinterpretations of legends and archeological artifacts. In any case, there is no indisputable proof that extraterrestrials have been to our world, now or in the past.
Mr. Hess politely heard me out, but I couldn’t help but notice his wry smile. What sort of evidence would you need to make you change your mind? he asked. It would have to be pretty strong, I said. Stronger than anything I’ve seen so far, at least.
By then, Linda had returned to the counter with a biography she’d heard about. While I bought it for her, we briefly discussed where to have lunch. Mr. Hess recommended the Jekyll Island Club; now a resort hotel, its restaurant was open to the public, and he said that we’d probably enjoy the menu. Linda and I decided that this would be our next stop, so we left the bookstore and walked across the compound to the hotel, where we got a table on its courtyard terrace.
We were just finishing our Cobb salads when our waiter came to the table and asked if I happened to be Mr. Steele. Since my family didn’t know exactly where Linda and I were, my first thought was that there had been some sort of emergency and that they were desperately trying to find me. But then he produced a thick manila envelope and explained that it had been dropped off at the club’s front desk, with instructions that it be delivered to me. The waiter didn’t know where it had come from or who had brought it to the restaurant; there was no name on the envelope, or any clue as to its origin.
Opening the envelope, I discovered a typewritten manuscript, its ink fading on paper already yellow with age. There was a breeze upon the terrace, so I didn’t examine it then and there, but instead took it back to my hotel, where I read it that afternoon before getting dressed for the wedding. Because Linda and I had to leave early Sunday morning to begin the two-day drive back to Massachusetts, I didn’t get a chance to return the manuscript to the bookstore, where I have little doubt it came from. I suspect, though, that Mr. Hess didn’t want to get it back. Apparently he’d waited a long time for someone like me to come along, and the fact that subsequent attempts to contact him have been met with silence reinforces my opinion that he wishes to have this document made public.
I’ve inserted footnotes for the sake of clarity, but have otherwise left the manuscript unedited. I don’t know whether to believe this story; that, I’ll leave to the reader.—AMS
I. The Millionaire
My name is Solomon Hess, and I was once the personal valet of William Apollo Russell. It was in this capacity that I witnessed the terrifying events of March, 1934, on Jekyll Island, Georgia, which have never been made public…until now, by my own hand.
As I write, twenty years later,9 few people remember my former employer. His name has been largely forgotten, save by historians of American popular culture. In his day, though, William A. Russell was one of the most successful New York magazine publishers. Apollo Publications, Inc., which he established in 1919 upon the foundation of his late father’s printing business, produced more than a dozen magazines every month. Although a few were respectable periodicals like The American Liberty and Apollo Monthly, most of them were cheap fiction magazines that catered to the masses: Private Eye Mystery, Fascinating Science-Fiction, New York Romance, Silver Star Western, and its bestselling title, The Gang Buster.10
It was from these “dime novels” that William A. Russell had become a wealthy man. In his late-thirties, trim and athletic, with a high forehead beneath jet-black hair, he was a fixture of Manhattan high society, regularly seen in its more exclusive clubs and bistros. His residence was a townhouse just off Gramercy Park, where he regularly entertained the rich and influential, and among his possessions were a private Pullman sleeper car for when he travelled by rail to his 1,500-acre horse farm in the Berkshires. His financial assets were nearly bottomless, or so it seemed to anyone who knew him.
Yet William Russell was not without liabilities. His wife, Edith Russell, was a heavy drinker, and she wasn’t entirely faithful to her husband. She was often spotted in various “speak-easies” on the lower East Side, usually in the company of younger men of less than sterling reputati
on, and Mr. Russell spent considerable time and money keeping her name out of the gossip columns. It was rumored that he hadn’t gained his fortune entirely from the magazine business, but rather that he’d made an arrangement with a certain crime syndicate to allow them to smuggle liquor into the country inside rolls of paper trucked in from Canada. Indeed, one of the reasons why Apollo Publications produced so many titles was to deter suspicion from the vast amounts of pulp-stock it brought in from north of the border. Furthermore, it was also the subject of hearsay that William Apollo Russell wasn’t the name on his birth certificate, but instead one that he’d adopted in order to conceal his Jewish ancestry, which he apparently considered to an impediment to acceptance within certain New York social circles.11
But perhaps my employer’s worst problem was money: namely, how to keep it. Almost no one knew it at the time but, contrary to appearances, by the winter of 1933 Mr. Russell’s financial situation had become rather precarious. He had invested heavily in the stock market, and while the crash of 1929 wasn’t quite the disaster to him as it had been to others, nevertheless he’d lost a considerable amount of money. Since the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment also caused the loss of his Prohibition-era income, that meant his fortune had come to rely solely upon his magazine empire. And Mrs. Russell’s lifestyle was costly to maintain, although it could hardly be said that Mr. Russell was frugal himself.
I was aware of all these things because of my close proximity to him. Someone such as William A. Russell may be able to conceal the truth from friends, business associates, and even the IRS or the FBI, but there’s little that he can hide from his “gentleman’s gentleman.” And while I can’t consider myself to have been his confidante, there wasn’t much in his household that I didn’t see.
How I came to be Mr. Russell’s valet is worth noting. It wasn’t my intent to be hired as such when I first visited the midtown offices of Apollo Publications in the summer of 1931. I was eighteen years old then, a recent graduate of DeWitt Clinton High in the Bronx, and it was my life’s dream to become a writer. My family couldn’t afford to send me to college, though, so I couldn’t afford the benefits of a higher education. Thus I hoped to land a job at Apollo Publications, perhaps as an editorial assistant, and eventually work my way into the position of being a staff writer for The American Liberty.
A letter of introduction from my high school principal, a hand-me-down suit from an older cousin, and stack of clips from the school’s literary magazine managed to get me an interview with William A. Russell. He greeted me cordially enough, but gave my stories and poems from The Magpie only a brief perusal before informing me that his company had no job openings, not even in the mail room. However, he himself needed someone: a personal valet, a manservant who would lay out his clothes, remind him of appointments and social engagements, greet dinner guests at the door, bring him a cup of hot chocolate at bedtime, and all the other things for which a busy person needed assistance. I seemed to be a bright and eager young lad: would I be willing to take this job?
It wasn’t what I was expecting, to be sure, but I immediately accepted the offer. My father was a tailor, so making sure that a man’s clothes fit him well wasn’t beyond me. The salary was generous, and since the job also included room and board in his Gramercy Park townhouse, I was intrigued by the prospect of rubbing elbows with New York’s social elite. And I had my own private agenda as well. I believed, perhaps naively, that if I did well for Mr. Russell, he might be impressed enough by my performance to reward me with that position at The American Liberty I so dearly wanted.
In hindsight, though, I believe the real reason why Mr. Russell hired me to be his valet had less to do with what I could do than with who I was. If he was, indeed, a Jew himself, then my background mirrored his own. Although one might suspect that he was fulfilling some unconscious desire to have a young Jewish kid from the Bronx whom he could boss around, I rather believe that he simply wanted to give me a leg up in the world. Mr. Russell could be arrogant on occasion, but he was never capricious or unkind, or at least not to me. At the very least, he treated me with far more respect than Mrs. Russell, whom he’d come to regard as little more than a hopeless drunk.
Indeed, I think her “delicate condition” was the reason why Mr. Russell joined the Jekyll Island Club. Climbing the social ladder was not something he had to worry about; he’d already been accepted into New York high society, and regularly saw many of the club’s members in the salons and grilles of Manhattan. Instead, I believe that he simply wanted to get away from her. By then, he and Mrs. Russell were married in name only; they no longer slept in the same room, let alone the same bed, and it was only the likelihood of a costly and very public divorce that prevented him from throwing her out of the house. But Mrs. Russell hated to travel—unless it was to Paris, where she’d spend her days buying expensive outfits that she’d wear only once, and her nights at the cabaret—and she was horrified by the prospect of wintering on some mosquito-infested island. Which suited my employer just fine; he’d go down south to Jekyll Island, while she…well, Mrs. Russell didn’t know it at the time, but her husband had plans for her.
During the 1920s, the Jekyll Island Club was still exclusive enough that it would have never admitted William A. Russell as a full member. By 1933, though, the situation had changed; most of its founding members had either died or were too old to travel, and the Depression had taken its toll on the fortunes of others, causing many to resign. So when its Board of Directors quietly announced that it would begin accepting applications for “associate memberships”—that is, people of wealth and means who were not necessarily among the hundred richest men in America—my employer leaped at the chance.
There was no question as to whether his application would be accepted. But just as he thought he’d have to settle for a clubhouse apartment, he chanced upon an opportunity that he couldn’t ignore. Riverside, the waterfront cottage that had been the winter home of Manhattan bank magnate Eliot Sloan, came up for sale following his death earlier that year. His family no longer wanted his place on Jekyll Island, and although the asking price of $180,000 was a severe pinch on Mr. Russell’s finances, he dug deep into his bank account and bought the house virtually sight-unseen. Next to that, his membership dues of $700 was little more than pocket change.
So while Mrs. Russell was sent off to Connecticut for a winter vacation,12 Mr. Russell and I packed up his wardrobe and boarded his private coach for the long train ride to Brunswick. I was his only servant to go with him; the rest stayed behind in New York. We arrived in the first week of January, 1934, where we boarded the club’s private launch, the Sylvia, for the final leg of our journey, a quick trip across St. Simons Sound and down the Jekyll River to the club’s boat dock. A Ford flat-bed truck was waiting for us there—one of very few automobiles on the island—and its colored driver loaded our trunks and suitcases before carrying us the short distance to Riverside.
II. The Compound
As it turned out, Mr. Russell had gotten a bargain for his money. The cottage was built in the Cape Cod style, white-painted and quite handsome, with bay windows, an enclosed wrap-around porch, and a third-floor widow’s walk. There was a lovely old willow tree in the front yard, its limbs draped with Spanish moss, and from the living room windows we could see the Jekyll River just a couple of hundred yards away. The house had come completely furnished, and although most of the couches, chairs, and tables were unfashionably Victorian, Mr. Russell was charmed by their quaint luxury. However, upon visiting the kitchen, he made a point of reminding me to acquire the new Sears catalog: the fixtures were embarrassingly out-of-date, including an old-fashioned ice box instead of a modern refrigerator.
Once he settled in, though, it wasn’t long before Mr. Russell became a fixture of the Jekyll Island social scene. He kept up with his business by mail and telephone; his mornings were usually spent in long-distance conversations with his associate publisher and various editors,13 and every day I’d visi
t the island post office, sending letters to New York and picking up the same in return. Mr. Russell would knock off work around noon, at which time he’d leave me with the household chores and walk up the road to the clubhouse for lunch. His afternoons were devoted to one of any number of activities. When the weather was fair, he’d join a foursome on the club golf course, located a short distance inland from the compound. When it rained, he’d play tennis in the indoor courts or find partners for a few hands of bridge in the recreation center. Once the weather grew warm enough, he swam laps in the club pool; although he wasn’t a hunter, a couple of times he joined a party that would venture into the wooded marshlands in search of deer, quail, or even the occasional alligator unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Late in the day, Mr. Russell would return to Riverside. A brief nap, then I’d help him into his tails for dinner at the club (white-tie was always required in the main dining room). Once there, he’d take a seat at his assigned table with other associate members, where they would dine on oysters, sea turtle soup, venison, grilled steak, and fresh greens from the club’s vegetable garden, to be followed by brandy and cigars in the drawing room. Once or twice a week, he would have dinner at the cottage; he’d hired a couple of part-time cooks from the club’s staff, a young Negro by the name of Robert and his wife Lilly, both of whom were wizards in the kitchen, and he’d invite over a few friends for an informal get-together.
For the most part, though, once he returned from the club, it was to spend a quiet evening at the cottage: smoking, reading, listening to the radio. By then, I had finished my chores for the day, and would use the time to pursue my own interests—that is, writing short stories on the Remington portable typewriter Mr. Russell had recently given me as a holiday present. Over the course of the last three years, I’d gradually come to realize that my prospects of joining The American Liberty’s editorial staff were slim or none, and that my best chance of “breaking in” was to write stories for his pulps. Besides, I’d lately come to enjoy reading and writing science fiction; perhaps I wasn’t destined to become the next Robert Benchley, but maybe I could share a contents page with Edward E. Smith or Jack Williamson. So I worked in my little room next to the pantry, sitting on the edge of my bed with my typewriter on a folding table.
