Left to his own devices, Rupert liked to walk through the mansion with a smug smile of satisfaction on his face, contemplating how all the empty rooms didn’t help anyone who hadn’t enough money to afford even a modest version of a roof over their heads.

Rupert liked to be on his own. It was something he preferred to having an audience, unless he was behaving particularly badly when he liked to have an audience.

He didn’t care for people, and got rid of them from his companies as soon as the technology allowed.

People got ill, wanted holidays, and weren’t available at any time of the day or night to do what he wanted them to do.

Thanks to the latest level of robotics, he had been able to dispense with most of them. It was one of the reasons why, at the age of eighty-five, he’d regained a certain spring to his step. His bitter and twisted life-force surged. He’d read bitter and twisted was the best approach to have if you wanted to live to a great age. Maybe he’d live to a hundred?

The previous week he’d fired three hundred people in Warrington, Widnes, Runcorn, somewhere in the North West of England. He couldn’t remember exactly where. He liked firing people just before Christmas. It gave those fired plenty of time to think about the terrible situation they were in over the holiday period.

Ten years back, Rupert had experienced a delayed mid-life crisis - a sense of his own mortality had suddenly settled upon him, and for the first time in his life he thought it was possible he might die. Which was why he became concerned about how, when he was gone, if he did go, and he believed

somewhere there must be a second opinion on the matter, other people might well enjoy all the financial benefits of his hard work.

He’d decided what he needed was something that burned through large amounts of money to any inheritors chagrin. And the idea came to him for an enormous no expense spared Mausoleum to himself. So, with his heart swelling to the size of a peanut he started building the monument.

Ten years later it was almost finished.

Now, still full of the fresh vitality the project had given him, Rupert was having his portrait painted. Keen to get the record of himself straight before the end of the year, he’d scheduled the final sitting just before Christmas.

‘When would suit you?’ he’d asked her.

‘Tuesday 22nd in the morning. Then I could get away early for Christmas,’ she’d said.

‘Excellent. Thursday 24th in the afternoon it is then.’

And Thursday 24th in the afternoon it was.

She had to admit, she was finding it difficult not to make Rupert look like something looted from the Valley of the King’s. Still, Goya had painted the horrible Spanish Bourbons looking like a bunch of mentally challenged greengrocers, and they hadn’t noticed.

The guy with no redeeming features was what she had to work with, and the paint went on the canvas accordingly, coagulating into an out in the open version of Dorian Grey.

She’d put his Mausoleum in the background, in the hope each day, it might move across the canvas closer to him.

To her, apart from the odd remnant of scaffolding, the beast of a building looked finished. She couldn’t help but wish him well in it.

A house cat went inside one of the cardboard boxes provided for it, like a lion getting inside a wheely bin on the Serengeti.

‘One moment,’ said Rupert, and softly softly went over and trapped the cat inside the box. An awful kerfuffle kicked off inside. Rupert turned his mummy like face back towards his portrait painter, and with a look of intense satisfaction, grinned, as if life didn’t get any better than this. ‘He’s no Schroedinger’s Cat,’ said Rupert as the feline continued to thrash around in blind panic until he let it out.

With the sitting over, the domestic service robot showed his portrait painter out. With her gone, he wouldn’t need to see another living soul over the two week Christmas and New Year period.

Rupert looked out from the unwelcoming front of his house towards what he’d been told was the outside world. Somewhere, out there, were wives and ex- wives, relatives and children who he had no interest in. And he turned his back on all of them.

A couple of years earlier, just before Christmas he’d let all the house staff go, replacing every one of them with the very latest Japanese device.

‘Get rid of the human beings and the planet will soon recover,’ Rupert believed - which was as far as he got to when it came to being a friend of the environment.

‘Hoka ni nanika arimasu ka,’ said the robot, in Japanese.

‘Oh, shut up. Go and switch yourself off.’

Rupert gazed out of the large National Socialist sized picture window at the back of the house over to his Mausoleum - complete now except for the ten kilograms of gold pinnacle at its very top, an inert gleam still to be secured into the stone forever, self maintaining, slowly glinting across the M11 south of Bishop Stortford, landmarking a joyless part of Essex - giving passing motorists a dark star to steer into the abyss by.

He stared at the monument to himself, a piece of work as modestly priced as a luxury yacht bought at a Dubai boat show, and decided he’d go over and inspect its freshly fitted out interior.

*

He punched the code - Two, Zero : Zero, Four: One, Eight, Eight, Nine, into the pad. The steel door clicked open. He went through into the tomb. The door closed soundlessly behind him.

Darkness in a large interior space gave a sense of otherness, why shouldn’t there be something in the dark? There might well be. It was one of the essential qualities of the dark.

And in the gloom of a dormant system coming back on line there was something.

Two doll like automata moved towards him. Two figures that hadn’t quite yet mastered the art of a human’s stumbling gate wobbled forward. As the lights came fully up on them, Rupert saw one had the falcon head of the Egyptian god Horus, and the other the jackal like head of Set.

‘Welcome,’ they said cheerfully in unison. ‘How may we help you?’

‘You can’t,’ said Rupert.

‘If you should need any assistance do not hesitate to attract our attention. I, and the rest of the visitor services team are here to help,’ said Set or else Horus.

‘Bugger off,’said Rupert.

Set and Horus didn’t seem to have any problem buggering off. They went into a corner and stayed there.

Rupert made a tour round this Ancient Egypt that he supposed at some point would be forever him. He made a mental note to schedule the annual rehearsal for his funeral rights sometime in the spring.

Every year Rupert forced everyone he disliked who depended on him for money, which was everyone he knew, to gather together. He gave them little warning so it was as inconvenient as possible for everyone to get there. Then, from inside a prototype coffin, he both directed the action, and showed off how he hadn’t lost his ability to intimidate whoever the hell they all thought they were.

He went back to the exit. ‘Please look into the camera to exit the building,’ sang the hidden speakers. He looked into the camera. Nothing happened.

‘Please look into the camera to exit the building.’ He looked into the camera. Nothing happened.

‘Please look into the camera to exit the building.’ He looked into the camera. Nothing happened.

A new retina scan system that hadn’t got any record of retinas in its memory failed to recognize him.

‘Why’s this been put in without telling me?’ demanded Rupert, as he punched Hitler’s birthday into the key pad. No response. He punched Hitler’s birthday in again. Still no response. Like a sucker he punched Hitler’s birthday in again. No response.

A message popped up saying how this system was now retina scan only.

‘Who needs security for getting out of a building anyway? Rupert raged, ‘A tomb isn’t a prison!’ But beyond his deep anger and resentment something had triggered, something that once started couldn’t be stopped.

Set and Horus had received the signal to perform their final task, the task they had ultimately been designed to perform.

While Rupert abused the electronic paraphernalia they moved towards him. Even when they were stood on either side of him Rupert didn’t notice them.

But he must have sensed something because he turned one way, then the other. ‘What are you two lemons doing? Here to help me get out. Good! About bloody time!’ Which was when Set injected him with what was prescribed for a preserved state of eternal insentience.

Using more than a little light pressure under the elbows Set and Horus rotated Rupert through into the horizontal. ‘Please relax on your final journey,’ they cooed as they carried him screaming, as loudly as any eighty-five year old could scream, over to the sarcophagus.

Rupert felt the preserving fluid stiffening his extremities, moving upwards through his body, turning him into something stone like and inert. Now numbed, unable to cry out, with only his eyes still sensitive to what was happening, he was lowered into the open vault.

A granite lid, with a sound somewhere between the flush of velvet and the clink of wine glasses slid over his wide open eyes sealing him in.

The lights went out. Set and Horus switched themselves off.

Photo of Alex Knight in Unsplash