The Crystal Skull, with creeping electrical charges, shining on a granite plynth…….

She stood in the ancient barrow, staring at the image, shocked that something like this could be in such an ancient place. They has walked in through the back entrance, which was closest to the road. On the way back to the caravan site. They liked visiting ancient monuments, standing stones and triliths, so this had been a must see. They had torches so it was easy to crouch down under the stones and worm their way in. They expected to enter a hollow chamber, with a flat stone seat or altar- but not this? Not something out of myth and time.

The crystal gleamed strongly in the torch light, and yet it seemed flattened somehow? Then the voice spoke, in a Birmingham accent ‘you’re safe here!’ ‘it’s a hologram! Part of the theme for Halloween, if you’d come in the front you would have seen the banners’.

Sure enough as they left the tomb they could see signs ‘Grand opening’ ‘special event’. ‘Yes we haven’t got the money to do archaeology properly any more. It’s the cuts in grants, that’s the way things are these days’, he said quietly. ‘That’s the real horror’.