The Third Skull
Over many decades, moisture gathers into green pools in the corners of the courtyard, creating irregular puddles of shallow water that are slick and slimy at the edges. Insects hover and drown. What are meant to be drainage ditches clog with centuries of leaves. On the stone balustrades lining the outdoor patio, rain draws salt out of the granite, which crystallizes and hardens into blotches of white; elsewhere the stone sprouts mossy fur and crusts over with lichen like eczema on weathered skin.
The first paving stones are laid in the fifteenth century, and, in a matter of weeks, the first walls of the house stand tall, never to lie down again. The vast back courtyard is added a few decades later and then the arched entryway, followed by more rooms, staircases, and a modest tower. Repairs and additions are constant but piecemeal. The roof collapses; the roof is reconstructed. The roof leaks; the roof is patched.
Halfway through the sixteenth century, a hulking wooden door is carved and installed at the front entrance, but the door has no actual handle for another forty years, just a metal bar to barricade it from the inside at night. The seventeenth century announces itself and a metalsmith arrives with a wrought iron lion’s head door knocker, which he bolts to the center of the door. Sometime in the eighteen hundreds, two stone lions settle down to flank the entrance. Barely six months after their arrival the stone beasts are already white with salt and green with fungus, as if they’ve been there for a millennium.
By the time the twins are born at the end of the twentieth century, the whole property is damp and mildewed. Whether the season is rainy or dry, the girls wear shoes inside, in case a leaking window invites water onto the tile floor. Cracks between the tiles present endless fascinations when the two are young. They find hairpins and nails, bird claws and yarn, evidence of the fifteen or maybe twenty generations who have lived in the house before them, leading all the way back to when the house was grand, although their mother insists its grandeur has only been burnished by the ages: now it is grand not because it is gleaming, she says, but because it is old. By the time the twins turn twelve, two of the other houses along the pilgrims’ route have burned down—newer houses made of wood and drywall. People build and rebuild. Old things matter.
• • •
When they are thirteen, the girls walk the entire route themselves, but not because of any desire to spend a month on the road. In fact the younger one, Maddalena, has a tantrum after her second blister and complains nearly enough to make her sister, Maria, turn back. Their parents have never told them which of the two was born first, but Maria knows she’s the eldest. Their brother, Sebastian, who is definitely older than both of them, has already walked the route four times, and this is good for business. He drums up enthusiasm and convinces people to stop by their house.
It turns out that word of mouth is still effective in a time when pilgrims are tracking their progress on their phones and paying at the roadside inns via QR codes. The dwindling pilgrims have pre-planned their trips according to influencers’ videos and travel forums. The twins’ parents have installed several new signs, yes, with QR codes, by the side of the road leading up to the turnoff to their home: Skull of St. Veronica. PRECIOUS RELIC!! Lemonade beer snacks. But the best way to gather visitors, who are asked to drop a coin into a slot before passing through the curtains to view the relic, is now their son. He’s annoyingly chatty and always carries a beer. His family home is nearly halfway along the route to the church at the end of the road. Tired walkers can be tempted to rest.
Few pilgrims are truly interested in the family relic, because the relic is not real. The family doesn’t mention it anywhere on the signs or the brochures, but anyone with a smartphone knows. The twins’ grandmother ruined things when, in her last year of life, she finally agreed to test the precious thing around which all their lives were organized. She wanted proof before she died. She cried while the scientist scraped off a sample of bone from the left mandible to take away for chemical analysis. In truth, the carbon dating wasn’t necessary: the scientist knew as soon as he picked up the skull that it was wrong. It did not belong to Veronica. It belonged to an adolescent boy. Testing is a mistake, the family now knows. As long as a thing remains untested it is neither true nor false.
• • •
Small consolation: the family lore about the relic holds true. The girls know the story inside and out—the foundational family myth, the myth whose foundation makes them a family. Famed ancestor, Ursula the Wanderer, undertook one of those grueling medieval pilgrimages, and after twenty years away she returned from Syria, starving, with a precious skull in her bag. She had paid in silver and years of labor for this bona fide relic, a serious relic, a relic worth gambling one’s life for, along with a note written by a priest on a tiny rolled-up piece of vellum to prove it.
The skull bore fruit. With its profits she built a house along the pilgrimage path, reasoning correctly that this was the right audience. As her children and their children added to and patched up the home, they built an increasingly elaborate reliquary in the living room to house the skull: what began as an ornate silver chamber, internally padded with red velvet and lined with mirrors, was eventually outfitted with gemstones and gilded flourishes and placed on a plinth of inlaid precious wood surrounded by two layers of burgundy curtains that could be pulled aside with tasseled cords for maximum drama.
Throughout most of its life, the relic hovered in the blissful ambivalence of unverified legitimacy. Everyone came: a pilgrimage that included Saint Veronica was no small deal. This was Veronica, the woman who encountered Christ as he ascended his own mournful pilgrimage toward redemption in slaughter—Veronica, who wiped his face with her own veil, creating a perfect imprint of God’s face in his own sweat and blood. The veil that became known as the holy shroud: an immaculate image created through the simple miracle of contact. An image that is not a representation but an incarnation. An image like a handprint on a paleolithic cave. An image like time travel. An image that is the closest to the real thing. Veronica was an artist. Veronica was a genius. And this was the skull where her eyes used to be.
People come to see the skull now because it is strange, not because it is spellbinding. Some come because it is morbid. A few disturbing zealots ask to lay their hands upon it to feel its energies. Veronica’s skull was always a roadside attraction, a curiosity, a moneymaker, but it used to be more than that, too: it had the dignity of authenticity, the authority of blessing. Now it has the taint of a hoax—as if the family were a family of scammers, as if centuries of dedication and millions of devotees don’t add up to make a relic of a valuable, if less holy, sort.
• • •
Maddalena performs the first miracle. At fourteen, already sure she’s an atheist, still unsure if she’ll be beautiful, angry at her sister for being both godly and gorgeous, she decides to spend her summer turning the attic into an art studio. Nobody has been up inside the cramped, unlit space under the rafters since anyone can remember. Her father helps her set up the ladder and bang down the trapdoor. They’re incredibly short on money; he works as a carpenter now.
Where she’d expected bat droppings and bird shit, Maddalena finds a strangely pristine little room. The corners are dark. She shivers. The beam of her flashlight illuminates a stack of slightly dust-filmed boxes. She suspects that the attic is not going to make a good studio; she’ll need to find somewhere else to make artwork in secret, somewhere Maria can’t watch.
She begins to sort through the crates, at the bottom of which is a heavy, gunmetal box. It looks old and valuable, with curlicues etched into its surface.
There is so little room for mystery in Maddalena’s life that she feels the urge to prolong the moment, or maybe leave the box unopened. Her mother has told her about Pandora, a woman blamed for everyone’s problems. She doesn’t want to be blamed for anyone’s problems. And there’s something weird about this box. It’s weird because it strikes her as familiar.
Later, Maria will tell everyone that Maddalena had to bang the box with a hammer 39 times before it would open, and that when it opened, a spooky gust of air and an otherworldly scent wafted out of it, and then an ethereal voice whispered in her ear. Maria will embellish the story to the point that Maddalena starts to forget what happened, clinging onto her own memory like a life raft.
The memory is this. She lifts the lid. Inside the box she sees her own face staring back at her. Minutes pass before she understands that she’s looking at a reflective pane of glass. She tilts the box away and sees herself again—but now she is dead. In a trick of the light, the reflection of her face is perfectly overlaid upon what is beneath: a skull whose face is the size of her face, whose empty eye sockets glare directly into her own, evacuating her of herself. It is the most horrible thing she has ever seen. When she tells this to her sister, Maria will insist that horror is the truest proof of a miracle.
• • •
A tenth of the 21st century is over and a new scientist is in the attic. Six journalists are drinking coffee on the stone patio. They’re here to take pictures of the scientist’s first encounter with the newly discovered skull. The twins’ father cannot believe that his wife has invited another scientist into their home. Once you’ve got a fake, she repeats, you have no recourse to shroud yourself with the hazy cloud of unknowing. Might as well roll the dice. Might as well open the box.
The scientist whom the pontiff has sent this time is the daughter of the scientist who tested the first skull. A dynasty of disbelievers, Maria says to her sister with a smirk when they hear this news. Maddalena doesn’t smirk back; she’s no longer comfortable calling herself a disbeliever, but she doesn’t want to give Maria the satisfaction.
Nobody in the family has been able to sleep. The thought that this other skull has been there all along, above their heads, is creepy and confusing. All five of them feel a sense of foreboding, that this heralds catastrophe. Another fake, their father assumes.
This time, the catastrophe is otherwise. After a long delay, the newspaper publishes results from the lab. The bone sample is nearly two thousand years old. The cranium, mandible, and six remaining teeth belong to a woman in her sixties, the age that Veronica is said to have been when she died. There is no shortage of public jubilation and public outcry. People want so badly to be vindicated, outraged, or both.
The cataclysm outside is matched by the crisis in Maddalena’s psyche: A part of her refuses to believe what she’s been told. She spends hours researching bone chemistry on the internet. Scientists lie, don’t they? The Vatican’s scientists, paid to manufacture belief? She keeps her mouth shut.
The good news is also bad. If the skull is real, the family can’t keep it. What a wonder that it has survived so well for so long in an attic. Unbelievable, really. Such an artifact does not belong in their old, moist, roadside home. The skull is sent to a sealed, climate-controlled chamber in Rome. Although it has only just been resurrected from its coffin it must now be sent back to the grave. Eventually, everyone assumes, it will be put on display.
• • •
The church does not allow the sale of relics, because holy objects are priceless and are not to be treated as commodities, so nobody pays the family for the skull. Does the church really have the power to repossess—to steal, like that? Is the Pope Catholic?
After the new relic, which is really the old relic, is taken, the family is despondent. Eventually, they quietly receive a bank deposit, enough to make up for a few months of income, but they are sour over this consolation prize, compared with lifetimes of sustainable tourism revenue. Misfortune masquerading as luck, their father says. Forsaken, their mother says.
Sebastian performs the second miracle. One morning, he gathers the family into the living room, the reliquary room, and passes around an expensive digital camera he’s borrowed from a British pilgrim he met on the route, a woman he might also be a little bit in love with. He shows them the screen as he scrolls through the photos. Before the skull was snatched away, he took over a thousand photographs. The images are so high-resolution that they can be used to recreate a perfect three-dimensional replica.
Maddalena rolls her eyes; Maria kisses her cross. Their parents are far too easily convinced—they feel old and unable to trust themselves. They drain the bank account and buy the best virtual reality headset on the market. Sebastian calls the British tourist; she works in tech and knows what to do. In a matter of months, a company sends them a hard drive with files containing the third skull.
• • •
A quarter of the twenty-first century is gone and along the pilgrim’s route a sign advertises an Immersive Relic Experience. Visitors can don one of twelve headsets and view the holy skull. They can pick the skull up and hold it in their hands. They can watch an educational video about carbon dating. They can participate in a staged interaction between Saint Veronica and Christ, performed by two relatively famous actors. They can opt to become Veronica. They can lift a shroud and press it to Christ’s face.
The pontiff performs the final miracle. With the stroke of a pen, he converts replica into relic. After careful deliberation over scripture and consultation with historians, he decides that, if Veronica’s shroud can be a relic, a VR replica can be a relic. After all, many important scholars have argued that Veronica’s shroud is the first work of mechanical reproduction. What could be more fitting than to extend Veronica’s legacy through the most advanced, accurate, mechanical reproduction technologically possible? And Veronica remains a special case. The eyes of this sacred skull once looked upon Christ, a holy witnessing, a bodily sight doubled with a spiritual sight. We exalt all methods, ancient and modern, of bringing believers around the world face-to-face with the face that saw God.
The decree is a tacit admission of sorts. How many relics out there are replicas, really? And does it matter, as long as they remain untested, in the valley of uncertainty? Maddalena distrusts the church’s motives. This just sets a precedent for the further franchising of holy experience, she figures. But her sister’s faith is buoyed once again by the blessing. She leaves home to double-major in theology and technology, convinced that virtual devotion is the way of the future.
Sebastian stays in the house and prepares to raise his own family with the British tourist, who is now his wife. Each year, Sebastian steadily raises prices for VR pilgrims. Does Sebastian believe in God? Sebastian believes in money, and money comes from God, so one could say that his faith is strongest of all.
Maddalena moves to a faraway city where everything is newly built. She feels unburdened, lonely, and light. In her large, industrial loft she paints hundreds of memento mori, one skull after another, trying to capture the moment in which she saw herself dead. She wants to make a painting that is better than accurate. She wants to make a painting that shows what it’s like to be fooled into seeing the truth.
Elvia Wilk is the author of the novel Oval (2019), the essay collection Death by Landscape (2022), and a novel called A Diagnosis coming in 2026. Her essays, criticism, and fiction have been published in many places. She is also a teacher and an editor.