Holy Vengeance Reloaded

Screenplay draft

In the marble cloister of St. Cecilia’s, the sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Chord gathered each dawn for rehearsal. Their voices cracked on the high notes of the Te Deum while Sister Violette, her hair still streaked the violent purple she had worn on the street, kept time with a rosary whose beads had been filed to points. The chapel smelled of beeswax and gun oil. Beneath the altar, wrapped in altar cloths, lay the first shipment of sanctified blades delivered by a courier who claimed to be an archangel in a brown uniform.

The command arrived on the night the stained-glass window of Saint Michael cracked from the inside. A voice like splintering choir stalls told them the city below the hill was seeded with demons that fed on unconfessed sin. Their new office was to harvest those souls at night and return before Lauds. Sister Agnes, the tone-deaf choirmistress, received the order without surprise and assigned Violette the first watch. The novice’s hands shook, yet she answered with the only phrase that still felt like prayer: “They will come again and again, my dear.”

By day the sisters drilled in the refectory, moving between stations of the cross while passing knives under the table. Their scalpel work on the daily bread became precise enough to sever a carotid between bites of pot roast. At Compline they rehearsed harmonies whose intervals matched the arc of a thrown blade; when they sang flat, the knives veered left and found the practice dummies stitched from old cassocks. Violette apologized to each dummy after every strike. The others stopped correcting her.

Night missions began in the service tunnels under the cathedral district. Sister Agnes led the first sortie with a silenced pistol tucked inside her cincture. They returned before Matins with three heads in a market tote and a new harmony for the Magnificat. Kill counts were tallied in Latin numerals chalked on the sacristy floor. The numbers rose in thirds and fifths until the ledger looked like sheet music. Violette’s column always ended with an extra apology murmured into the stone.

Midway through the second month the demons adapted. One wore the face of a lost postulant and begged for last rites inside a confessional. Sister Beatrice granted it and was eviscerated before the grille. The surviving nuns dragged her body to the crypt and continued practice above her, their voices now steadier because grief had corrected their pitch. That night they traded knives for the chainsaw kept in the reliquary beside Saint Lucy’s eyes. The saw’s two-stroke engine harmonized with their lowest sustained note. Violette, sent alone into the rain, felled four demons on the riverfront and whispered her line to each before the blade finished its work.

The reversal came during the feast of Saint Cecilia. A vision showed them that the demons were not invading from outside but were the unshriven fragments of their own voices, given flesh by years of false notes. The marble halls themselves began to weep ichor. The sisters barricaded the cloister doors with pews and sang the full Office while the walls cracked. Violette, hair grown out at the roots to mouse brown, stood at the center of the nave with the idling chainsaw. She had stopped apologizing. When the largest fragment, wearing Beatrice’s face, lunged, Violette severed it at the waist. The body split into two perfect fifths that still tried to sing.

At dawn the cloister was silent. The surviving nuns filed into the garden carrying the chainsaw like a processional cross. Violette placed it on the stone bench where the first rosary lesson had been given. She lifted her hand as if to conduct, then let it fall. No note emerged. Far below the hill a siren rose and held a single imperfect tone. The sisters listened without joining. Violette’s final whisper was not an apology but the beginning of a new silence that the city, for one held breath, did not dare to answer.