Everil Worrell's The Gray Killer
We just read our third Everil Worrell story, The Gray Killer (Weird Tales November 1929), and it did not disappoint. We got it from the Internet Archive, by the way, and so can you. Needlessly to say, there will be SPOILERS.
Confined to a hospital bed due to an injured foot, Marion Wheaton begins to notice strange happenings and is convinced they're connected to the mysterious doctor who visits the patients during the night...
Was it due to fever that every little happening of this night took on a grotesque significance? Be that as it may, the appearance of the liquid in the hollow glass tube was violently repulsive to me: a viscid, slimy-looking, yellowish white, with an overtone of that same gray color that made the hand holding it look like the hand of a corpse. At the same moment an odor assailed my nostrils: a putrescent aroma of decay; the very essence of death embodied in a smell.
This starts as Marion's diary, so one immediately suspects things aren't going to end well (shockingly, one might be wrong). The doctor is so incredibly creepy and the first meeting between him and Marion so full of red flags that even when a couple of patients are miraculously cured, you just know that this happiness won't last and will likely be followed by some horrific side effects. Before we find out what exactly the doctor is doing and wants, there's still time for the bloody murder of a child. It happens off-page, but Marion manages to get a surprisingly gruesome description of the corpse through hospital staff. We were surprised at how far Worrell went, not just with this particular detail, but in general. Leonora and The Canal were pretty tame compared to The Gray Killer. The craziness increases as Marion's fears become real + the killer's motivation becomes known. Weird Tales split the story near the end and sent the rest to the magazine's last pages and so we thought there wasn't much more left - we were wrong. The killer's confession could easily have functioned as an independent tale with Worrell's last minute worldbuilding introducing a whole other world of extreme ickiness. Of all the things we thought Dr Zingler might be, that was not one of them.
VERDICT
The Gray Killer is pretty good. There's a spooky, ominous atmosphere throughout, as we watch and wait with Marion. On top of that, we get one of the weirdest villains ever. We doubt any editors will try to mess with this one. Worrell had a wild imagination and really should be way better known than she is.