The Strange Tale of Africa House

Africa House stands at the edge of the moor, its ochre stone bleeding rust where the rain has gnawed at it for decades. In summer the air around it hums faintly with the scent of overgrown roses, but in winter the garden collapses into a wilderness of thorns. The villagers pass it in silence. It has the look of a creature that once roared and now only dreams of sound.

Inside, the air is heavy with a faded sort of splendour — the perfume of camphor and old silk, the ghost of cigar smoke caught forever in the rafters. Dust lies on every surface like ash from some far-off fire. The portraits along the staircase have paled into anonymity, but their gilt frames still gleam faintly, as though unwilling to surrender the illusion of wealth.

It was built by Captain Lionel Ashcombe, though his name, like his glory, has begun to slip from memory. He returned to England a hero, bearing the world in fragments: masks and idols, tusks and skulls, shards of colour from continents the newspapers called dark. He built the house to contain them all, to prove that he had brought civilisation to heel. Each room was a conquest; each artefact, a small declaration of immortality.

Now the house seems to breathe against him. Its floors shift with the damp, its walls exhale dust. At night he lies awake and hears the timbers creak like the slow turning of a ship. Sometimes he imagines the sound of equatorial rain drumming above him, though the English sky is clear. The jungle he believed he had conquered has followed him home, patient and unseen, reclaiming him inch by inch.

Ashcombe moves through his corridors like a ghost condemned to watch his own afterlife. Once he was the embodiment of certainty — a man who could name a river and believe he owned it. Now his hands tremble when he opens the maps he once drew; the ink has bled, the borders have run, the colours have turned to the shade of old bruises. The world has rewritten itself without him.

When visitors come — fewer each year, and mostly for curiosity’s sake — they find him dressed as though for dinner at Government House: waistcoat fastened, boots polished, medals dulled but gleaming faintly in the candlelight. He pours the port himself, his smile courteous, his voice low, each sentence a relic from a vanished lexicon. They call him the last of his kind, not unkindly, but he hears the elegy in it.

At dusk he walks the gallery where the trophies hang. The lion’s head has grown dull; the glass eyes clouded like old amber. The ivory cracks along invisible seams, and when the wind moves through the house, the curtains billow as though the walls themselves are breathing. He pauses before his portrait — the proud gaze, the fixed certainty — and for a moment he cannot remember which of them is real.

He built Africa House to preserve himself, but it is the house that endures. It holds his triumphs, his sins, his silence. And as the years draw in, it begins to dream for him — a slow, fevered dream of jungles that outlive their hunters, of rivers that wash away names carved into their banks, of the great forgetting that comes for every empire.

For a long while, nothing happened. Or rather, the changes were too small to name.

Ashcombe still woke at eight each morning and rang for tea, still dressed as though he expected a visitor, still paced the veranda with the stiff, ceremonial gait of an officer on inspection. But the house had begun to wait for him differently. There was a watchfulness in its hush, a hesitation in the air, as though each object were holding its breath.

The first thing he noticed was the smell. Not rot, exactly — not yet — but the faint mineral scent of rain on hot stone. Impossible in England, yet unmistakable. It followed him from room to room, settling in the folds of his dressing gown, in the paper of his journals. He blamed the damp, the ivy, the servants. He did not think to blame the past.

Then came the sounds. The ticking of clocks began to wander — faint discrepancies, a few seconds lost here and there, as though time itself were tired of his precision. Floorboards swelled and sighed, though no one walked upon them. The great bronze gong he had brought from Zanzibar began to hum faintly in the night, a vibration rather than a sound, as though it remembered being struck.

He told himself the house was settling, that all old structures must groan. But something in the tone unsettled him — it was not the sigh of wood, but of breath.

By spring, letters began to arrive more seldom. The world beyond the moor had grown indifferent to its former heroes. New explorers spoke of machinery and trade routes, not discovery; their expeditions were measured in profit, not romance. Newspapers that once carried his likeness now printed words he did not understand — independence, self-rule, freedom. They sounded to him like the languages he had once been so proud to silence.

He walked the gardens alone, tracing the line of the crumbling balustrade with his fingertips. The stone felt warm, as if holding some secret heat. At his feet, the gravel had grown uneven, the path bending subtly toward the wildness beyond. It struck him that the earth was reclaiming its shape, erasing the geometry he had forced upon it.

And yet, there was beauty in it — a kind of weary magnificence. The moss, the ivy, the dust: they softened everything, even him. Sometimes he paused in the long gallery and thought the house almost merciful, as if it meant to return him to the earth gently.

But then the silence would change again — deepening, thickening, carrying with it a sound he could not quite place. It was not music, nor wind, nor memory, but something older, something rhythmic, patient, endless.

He began to dream of rivers. Of maps that bled. Of faces without eyes.

By summer, he no longer wrote to anyone. His handwriting had grown uncertain, his sentences looping back on themselves like lost expeditions. The servants left one by one, unnerved by his mutterings, by the way he stood for hours in empty doorways listening to nothing. He scarcely noticed their departure. He believed, perhaps, that the house itself would sustain him — that as long as he remained within its walls, history could not touch him.

And yet the ivy climbed higher, green fingers tracing the windows, and the damp crept through the skirting boards with the slow assurance of an advancing tide. Each night the air grew heavier, thick with a scent like wet earth and fever.

Captain Lionel Ashcombe, the great explorer, the man who had mapped the unmapped world, sat alone in the house he had built from its spoils. Around him the trophies softened and split, the globes faded to grey, the walls pulsed faintly as though with a distant heartbeat.

And still he would not leave.

He would die there, though not by violence. He would simply thin, like a photograph left too long in the sun, until he was part of the dust itself — until Africa House, breathing softly through the seasons, forgot whether he had ever been real.

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