Celluloid Villains

“Celluloid Villains”

Darryl Burrows

“May God have mercy on your soul,” rang the disembodied voice; a cold, hollow sound which came from beyond the brightness as the spotlight stared the inmate down like an unblinking Cyclops. The illumination was momentarily blinding as he winced involuntarily into the beam for the author of the voice. “Do you have any final words?”

That was the last thing anyone said to Louis Edgar Hanratty, #2647186-2, resident of San Ramos State Prison and convicted mass-murderer, before he was forced through the large doorway by a pair of massively muscled guards armed with batons and cattle-prods. He turned back to look at the figure beyond the light, his feet shuffling with the sound of old boots against concrete, his shackles rattling with each minor movement. His eyes strained against the flickering illumination that was in the foreground, the whole effect reminding him of a poorly-spooled movie reel from some dime theater feature he remembered seeing as a kid from the small town in which he lived, giving him very brief glimpses of a silhouetted head that seemed to move as though in still-frame sequences. Grinning back at it contemptuously, he winked almost charmingly and said, “I’ll tell the devil you said hello,” and punctuated this by hawking spit on the floor at his feet in a last gesture of scorn.

Unperturbed, the shadowy figure turned and nodded to someone Hanratty couldn’t see and said casually, “Let’s get this show on the road.” The voice had an odd quality to it so that one couldn’t be sure of the age or even the gender of the person behind it. Hanratty wondered if this was by design or if the person were truly androgynous.

The door he was moved through shut behind him with a bang and seemingly without human aid, as though closed by some hidden mechanism. The pair of brute escorts seemed very careful to make sure they themselves were well clear of the door as they sent him through. What followed was a brief inexplicable moment of disorientation and vertigo nearly making Hanratty vomit and causing him to wonder if this is what the end was supposed to feel like as so many of his victims had experienced. Once the sensation had passed some moments later, he cleared his eyes and was surprised to see he was not dead and that he had not been locked into place to prevent escape. Turning to the door he exited from he attempted the knob, gingerly at first, then with some force, and found it locked. It was a heavy paneled door, probably made of oak or some other hardwood, with an equally solid brass knob. There was no way he was going to knock it back opened nor did he think it wise to try. If this was to be the manner of his execution, he had no idea what new turn this was. He’d thought he was to be put to death by lethal injection, strapped down to a chair with a hood placed over his head in a pointlessly humane gesture. At least, that’s what the judge had passed as his sentence.

He had no idea to where the doorway admitted him, but he became immediately aware of three things as he found himself standing on the other side of it, none of which gave him much of a clue as to his whereabouts. The first thing he noticed was the rain; a virtual downpour. For some reason they’d sent him outside instead of the grimly antiseptic chamber he’d been expecting. Grinning, he thought perhaps they were planning to let him die slowly of pneumonia. “Wrong door, freaks,” he muttered in grim amusement, his own impending death part of some bigger game. It seemed he would die as he lived, entertained by the prospect of life and death, even his own.

The second thing that caught his attention was the strange absence of color in the setting he found himself occupying. It was dark, almost black and white, with some sort of ochre tint, like an old photograph. Further scrutiny told him that this was likely because it was not only cloudy and raining, but also nighttime. Another oddity considering the time of his execution was to be 9:00 in the morning. He’d even glanced at the clock on his way to the chamber. An eclipse, maybe?

Lastly, he realized he was unshackled. Somehow, the cuffs that held him had been removed upon stepping through the doorway. Rubbing his wrists, he saw marks where they had been. Oddly, he neither saw nor felt anyone who would have unlocked his shackles unless they did so during his brief moment of disorientation.

He looked around, trying to derive a better understanding of where he was or what kind of game was being played. Being let outdoors was the last thing he’d expected. He was supposed to be in a chamber, escorted by armed and burly prison guards to a waiting physician. If this was someone’s idea of a sick joke, he would not give them the satisfaction of entertaining them by running for the fences where they could happily shoot him in the back. If, on the other hand, someone from high up decided to set him free for some reason, he would not look a gift horse in the mouth. He damned well would find out the why of it later, once he reached safety, which for the moment he was not yet convinced he had.

Tempering his excitement, he took in the scene. He was on some sort of street, but not like any he’d recognized. Behind him, from the place he exited, was a type of old storefront, like something that had been built maybe a hundred years earlier. There were lamp posts casting weak and tepid illumination from above but which did nothing to color the gray around him. The plate glass window beside him had words stenciled on it reading “First National Bank” backed by venetian blinds. He did a double-take at the window, saw his image in it, or what should have been his image.

A different face looked back at him.

He thought at that point he might be prepared for anything, but found himself in error. His jaw slackened in stark amazement and the face looking back at him did the same, too well synchronized for even an expert pantomime. At first he thought it was distortion caused by the rain and the poor lighting, but the longer he looked the more he doubted it. He reached up to touch his face with his right hand and the counterpart raised a hand on the same side. He still felt the same growth of beard on his chin he remembered but the image in the window was clean-cut, the face of a man no less than a dozen years younger than himself. In spite of the relative youthfulness of the new face, there was a hard edge to it; a criminal aspect. As for the rest of the man looking back at him, he was of diminutive stature and dressed in a badly out-of-fashion trench coat and fedora which were dark as the midnight hour. How long has it been since men dressed like this? He asked himself, vaguely recalling that his grandfather used to dress that way on Sunday’s before he died some thirty years ago.

He looked back at the face and the eyes locked. Hanratty’s blood ran cold. The face looking back at him returned an icy glare that was chilling, a look with murder on its mind and he came to realize it was the very expression he wore. He softened his expression and the face followed suit. There was something hauntingly familiar about the face, something spectral, a face that was at once both familiar and frightening.

“I don’t know what this,” he spoke, unconsciously taking a half-step back, warily watching as the image in the window mimicked him. He halfheartedly convinced himself that someone else was in the building staring back at him but dismissed it upon realizing that the specter on the other side was wispy and two-dimensional, like a reflection. “Whatever this is you’re messing with the wrong guy.” The image continued to mimic him by mouthing something very similar.

As the stare-down in the window continued and Hanratty contemplated ending the exchange by smashing the glass to rid himself of his tormentor, he saw something in the background of the window out of the periphery of his vision. Behind him, in an adjacent building, someone looked out a window into the street. This latest apparition did not happen to be looking at him, and was indeed seemingly unaware that he was even there, looking instead down the street to the right of the intersection nearby Hanratty.  The portly man, dressed in attire of similar style to what Hanratty seemed to be wearing, was puffing on a stout cigar, hands resting casually in trouser pockets as he stood in a room full of chairs. He appeared to be casting expectant glances as though he were waiting for something—or someone.

Hanratty turned, slowly as to not attract the attention of this figure, watchfully resting his shoulder against a streetlight and unmindful of the rain still pelting him. He resisted the urge to do as he might have in a normal situation by approaching the man directly. If only for the moment, prudence got the better of him. He could wait patiently, in no hurry to give up his ghost, certain if he took his time he might actually survive—whatever this was—and have the last laugh against the penal system.

Watching from the shadows he placed his hands in the pockets of his prison jumpsuit when he felt something cold and familiar.

Guns.

There was a gun in each pocket, a pair of revolvers, six-shooters of some kind, probably .38’s. They had to be old as sin, but from what he could tell in the dim lighting they looked to be in perfect working order. He spun one of the cylinders and it glided freely on its axis as though it were made only the day before. Popping one open he saw there was a full magazine of ammo, snapping it closed again with a flick of his wrist. His heart pounded in excited anticipation at the thought he could make his escape, either by hostage or by shooting his way out.

The thought gave him pause. As with the removal of his shackles, when had the guns been placed upon him? They certainly weren’t in his prison fatigues when he got dressed this morning. He wondered to himself why someone would have given him weapons when he was being sentenced to death, failing to see the advantage of it from the respect of the penal system. This further confirmed his suspicion that someone on the inside was looking to help him. He planned to have his answers once he got out of this predicament.

Hanratty was not a stupid man. It had taken the feds over two years to catch him once they were on to him. He was intelligent and calculating but not imaginative, creative only when it came to ways of killing people and being elusive, not in rationalizing anomalies. He could be cautious when he needed to be, but were he more ingenious he might have been able to postulate a theory. Knowing his life was on the line gave him pause and like some animal in unfamiliar surroundings, decided not to dwell on the unknown for too long, opting for the moment to focus on survival. If he played his hand well everything else would become apparent later.

He pocketed the weapons to keep the downpour off of them and leaned back against the post, watching the figure in the window and the wisps of gray smoke gather around him beyond the window. The pane of glass was large enough to reveal the man in his entirety as he stood in a room with several chairs that might have been antique were they not in such pristine condition. Partly obscuring the man was the stenciled and oddly-familiar slogan “Western Chemical Company”. The man, he could see better from his new vantage point, was somewhat portly and stretching the vest buttons beneath his suit jacket. His stance was easy, casual, not a care in the world. Perhaps he had no idea he was being watched, let alone by one of the most notorious serial killers of the twenty-first century. Hanratty watched him grimly for a spell, oblivious to the rain which poured down on him in seemingly endless cascades, now numb to its relentless sting against his skin.

Momentarily, he heard the sound of approaching vehicles and saw a pair of cars drive up, elongated and obviously very old. Gas-guzzlers, not like the tiny hybridized contraptions the environmentalists he hated so much tended to drive. They might have been 1930’s Packard sedans, but he had no idea, not being an expert on very old automobiles. Much like everything else in this scene, they were in mint condition in spite of their apparent age.

Like a cat shrinking back from a potential threat, Hanratty ducked behind the stairwell to avoid detection, watching through the wrought iron railing at the cars as their wet brakes screeched to a halt in front of the building the man in the window occupied. Heart racing from excitement, he peered out at the new arrivals, the surreal aspect of the old cars amid all the other odd things beginning to affect him.

The man inside opened the door and no less than eight men piled out of the vehicles, led by a man with a light-colored trench coat carrying an umbrella. Out of some form of deference, he was admitted into the building first. Hanratty thought he heard one of the men say something to him just before he appeared from the lead car, but with the rain rapping loudly against the metal of the stairs and the awning in front of the bank, he couldn’t be certain.

One by one the new arrivals entered the building as the cars pulled away, but not before looking around, as though expecting someone might have followed them. Hanratty had no idea who they were or why they were there, but he wondered if they weren’t inmates like himself. If so, they may have been armed like he was. He knew he couldn’t assume anything; his own life was in the balance. He had to pause and assess the situation, postulating answers to some of the questions rolling around inside his head.

As to where he was, the appearance of the cars cemented in his mind that he was either somewhere in an earlier time period, or was at least being made to think he was. The clothing, the style of the buildings, the antiquated lettering, lack of any apparent technology that had existed for better than the last three-quarters of a century seemed to indicate someone went to a lot of trouble to trick him into thinking he was back in the early twentieth century, probably the twenties or thirties. He’d sometimes read research journals as a hobby during his five year period of incarceration: everything from temporal displacement to digital reality to nanotechnology to cryogenics tested on higher forms of life, like chimpanzees. The journals read like science fiction and much of it was beyond his technical understanding, involving hard theory and a lot of relativity, but gave him the indication that people were at least thinking about such things and were starting to dabble in experimental fields of physics. In a discussion with someone confined in a cell alongside him, the man vowed that they would move testing up from chimpanzees to inmates, having heard the government was allowing funding to be spent on experimentation with guys on death row. Hanratty had laughed him off as a conspiracy theorist or a crackpot, but in retrospect recalled seeing an unusual number of technicians and men with laboratory coats being escorted by guards through the prison causeway. He assumed at first they were doctors of medicine, visiting one of the inmates who’d had some rare illness. He knew of a guy inside who had neurofibromatosis and thought they were running experimental cancer treatments on convicted criminals. That theory got dispelled when that inmate died and there were still those men in white coats coming around. He remembered a time as he sat staring out from his bars that a group of them stopped and paused to look at him, talking amongst themselves and pointing until Hanratty charged the bars and screamed at them. They looked at him blandly as they moved away.

If they had been successful at playing with time travel it would have certainly explained his odd surroundings, but not his own spontaneous transformation. He supposed he could have been on some sort of hallucinogen, a humane way to numb him before death, but he didn’t think so. Everything was too vivid. The rain was real and getting him wet and cold, but all the same somehow he knew he did not look like himself. Regardless of who he looked like, he knew who he was. They could change what he looked like on the outside but not who he was on the inside. He glanced in a window once again, struggling to think about who he looked like. He must have seen the face somewhere no less than a dozen times before; that unsettling rictus of teeth when he grinned but never touched the eyes, cruel in a winsome way. It was a face so familiar-looking his mind wouldn’t let go of it, like an elusive thought one goes to bed with, and he figured if he gave up thinking about it, it would come back to him without the strain of remembrance.

He turned his attention back to the men entering the building, wondering at who they might be and whether they were to have any part in his death sentence. That they seemed oblivious to his presence told him that they were not likely omniscient. He glowered after them as they were in the building, a grin mounting on his face as he contemplated his next move. If indeed they were there to kill him, he would strike first. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d taken out multiple victims. Guns were not his style; he’d much preferred knives or strangling, but he knew realistically he was not going to take out as many as ten men with anything less. With a total of twelve bullets between the two guns he was going to have to make each slug count and could not afford to take hurried and wild shots. He would have to have them all pinned down in one area.

Once he was sure the men moved into a back room where they would not see him coming, he moved deliberately toward the building, his hands in his pockets and wrapped around the revolvers that sat there, cold and reassuring. He approached, picking up speed boldly with each step, thinking vaguely that there was something familiar about the whole scene, the building with the chemical company stencil, the rain, the old cars, the clandestine gathering of men, even his ducking by the stairwell. Like the face that looked back at him, it taunted him with its nearness to be remembered, a dream-bubble that had burst and was just out of reach.

He reached the glass door, his adrenaline pumping with each step and was surprised that it opened easily. It was unlocked as though they’d been expecting him, or perhaps it was unlocked for someone else. He walked through the room where the man with the cigar had once stood, gliding like a specter. The room was barren except for a few chairs. He pressed ahead, entering the room the men were in. They looked up at him in sudden surprise as though caught unaware. He had only a brief second or two to take in their faces. A few looked familiar, or rather had attributes of familiarity, much like his own borrowed face. With hardened expressions, they stared at him in unison as though they were born looking into the barrel of a gun. The leader, the man in the light colored trench coat, turned and moved toward him slowly and grimly.

Someone yelled “Tommy, no!” at the moment Hanratty opened fire. The gun battle was furious but brief. Hanratty watched foe after foe drop, wailing and screaming, but not before someone managed to crease him in the head with a poorly-aimed slug.

He staggered back outside, coughing and sputtering, weak knees struggling to hold him upright. Cursing to himself, he took the emptied guns and hurled them one-by-one through the window, smashing the glass in rage.

Maybe it was the shot that glanced off his skull, but things came to him in waves of clarity. The face in the window, the men in the building, the old cars and building design, the total absence of anything but black, gray and white, even the men in white coats and the flickering spotlight in the prison. Dropping to the street, he fought his way back to the bank he’d stood in front of at his arrival, chancing a look in the window as he moved toward it. The face had looked familiar because it was the face of a famous and long-departed man.

It wasn’t time travel; at least, not in a conventional sense.

Incredibly, he was somehow dropped into a scene from the movie “The Public Enemy”. He had no idea how they did it, but he was no longer Louis Hanratty; he was James Cagney, playing Tom Powers. Powers killed the men in this scene in retaliation for the murder of his friend, Matt Doyle. The movie plot provided the motivation for Cagney’s character as impending freedom had for Hanratty. Being let “out” was no mistake; this was how he was to be put to death, a character in a movie scene slated to die. His fellow inmate had been correct; they were experimenting on prisoners. Hanratty was the latest such guinea pig.

As he dropped to the street retching he knew he was doomed from this point. Having seen the movie two years earlier in the prison rec room, he remembered Tom Powers would be hospitalized and later kidnapped and killed, all while Hanratty was helplessly bound by the celluloid reality he was trapped in and unable to change the course of it. He wondered now whether the characters he saw on the screen were men like himself, trapped in a celluloid reel, or if they were the images of long-dead actors. His mind briefly flashed to movie nights and some of the old pictures they’d seen. “On the Waterfront” played just a couple weeks ago and he wondered if Brando’s brother Charley, played by Rod Steiger, might not have been Frank Murro who’d been executed not long before, murdered and hung in an alley on the big screen. Or could it have been Plato in “Rebel Without a Cause” who’d been shot down? Was he now to be the latest victim of the prison marquee?

For a killer like himself, this was a humane ending— dying in the scene of a movie as violently as he lived rather than whimpering at the end of a euthanizing needle like some family pet who’d outlived its usefulness.

With great effort, he turned his head in the direction he reckoned the camera to be positioned. He couldn’t be sure, but there seemed a dull flicker of light and whispers of muted voices, which may have nothing more than the passing of his consciousness.

“I ain’t so tough,” he choked falling to the puddled curb, not sure whether he really meant it or because it was part of the script.