A Change of Heart
The air inside the Fontaine mansion didn’t just feel stagnant; it felt heavy, vibrating with the silent, suffocating echoes of a life interrupted. Chase Beacroft stood in the grand foyer, his Italian leather shoes clicking against the cold marble—a sound that seemed irreverent in a place that had held its breath for forty years.
Chase was a man who calculated the world in margins and acquisitions. A self-made millionaire at thirty, he viewed history not as a human experience, but as a commodity. When he heard the Fontain estate was hitting the market, he didn’t see a tomb; he saw a goldmine. Tulula Fontain, the silver screen goddess who had risen from the obscurity of a studio cleaning crew to become the face of a generation, was a brand. And her house? It was the crown jewel.
“Everything stays,” Chase had insisted to the executors.
And everything had. The house was a time capsule of 1930s opulence. In the Parlour, a half-finished cigarette rested in a crystal tray. Upstairs, a silk robe was draped across the chaise lounge as if the owner had simply stepped out for a moment. Chase envisioned the velvet ropes, the guided tours, the exorbitant ticket prices for fans to glimpse the life of the woman who had been found at the base of these very stairs, her neck snapped, her youth preserved in the cruel amber of tragedy.
As the sun began to dip, casting long, bruised shadows across the foyer, Chase walked toward the grand staircase. He had decided to start the restoration here. He wanted to polish the mahogany bannister until it shone, to make it look exactly as it had the night Tulula fell.
He reached the landing and paused. He felt a sudden, sharp drop in temperature. It wasn’t the draft of an old building; it was a localised chill, a static prickle against his skin.
“Perfect,” he whispered, his voice sounding thin. “The atmosphere is already right for the tour.”
But then, he smelled it. The scent wasn’t the dust of decades or the dry rot of an abandoned mansion. It was gardenias—heavy, cloying, and fresh—mixed with the faint, metallic tang of expensive face powder.
Chase turned, expecting to see a contractor or a realtor, but the hallway was empty. Or so he thought. He looked toward the mirror at the end of the hall, intending to check his reflection, but his breath hitched in his throat.
The reflection in the antique glass wasn’t just his own. Behind him, standing near the top of the stairs, was a woman. She was breathtaking—olive skin that seemed to glow under the moonlight, and hair like a waterfall of midnight, cascading down to her waist. She wore a black evening gown encrusted with diamonds; the same one he had seen in her final screen test. She looked neither like a ghost nor a memory; she looked vibrant, terrified, and utterly alive.
The floorboards of the Fontaine estate groaned under Chase’s polished boots, a rhythmic protest that echoed through the cavernous foyer. He stood at the base of the grand staircase, his gaze locked upward, transfixed by the life-size portrait of Tulula.
She was a vision of silver-screen perfection, her posture regal and sharp. Even in oil and pigment, she radiated an aura that bypassed mere beauty and entered the realm of the hypnotic.
“Oh my,” Chase murmured, his voice barely rising above the draft that snaked through the entrance hall. “You were something else, weren’t you? No wonder the studio scouts were foaming at the mouth. You look exotic, dangerous… the kind of woman who left a trail of broken hearts and empty wallets.”
He traced the gilded frame with his eyes, already calculating the foot traffic. He could see the velvet ropes, the audio guides, and the endless queue of tourists dying for a glimpse into the life of the 1940s icon. He’d even commissioned a wax replica to sit in the Parlour—a tactile imitation of the woman who had once owned every room in this house.
He shivered. Her eyes, painted in a deep, melancholic brown, seemed to catch the sun’s dying light, tracking his every movement. It was a trick of the perspective, he told himself. Just art.
For weeks, the house had been a beehive of activity. Workmen had scrubbed the grime of decades from the crown moulding and polished the mahogany bannisters, but Chase remained the vigilant warden. Leave no footprint, he had told them. Everything had to remain exactly as it was when the goddess had vanished into the ether of history. The scent of her perfume—jasmine and clove—still clung to the heavy velvet curtains, defying the years.
Tonight, however, the house felt different.
A damp, unnatural chill clung to the air. As the last of the sun slipped behind the horizon, a strange, swirling mist began to bleed through the seal of the front doors. It didn’t belong indoors; it curled around the table legs and pooled at the base of the stairs, thick and grey like smoke from a dying star.
Chase turned to leave, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. He felt watched—not by the painting, but by something far more present.
“Almost ready,” he whispered to the silence, trying to summon his bravado. “They’re going to love you, Tulula.”
“Will they?”
The voice was a jagged thread of silk, vibrating in the very marrow of his bones. Chase froze. The foyer light flickered and died, plunging the house into a suffocating gloom, save for the pale, luminescent glow of the mist.
He looked up. The frame at the top of the stairs was empty. Chase spun around. The hallway was empty. When he looked back at the glass, she was closer. She was standing only inches from his shoulder, her dark eyes wide
He tried to steady his racing heart, his rational mind clawing for an explanation. “Who’s there?” he demanded, his voice cracking
The room grew colder. Suddenly, the silence of the house was broken by muffled sobbing—a desperate, choked sound. Then, a voice, soft as a dying whisper, drifted against his ear: “I didn’t fall. He pushed me.”
“Who?… Chase, what the hell are you doing? I’m hearing things; I’m seeing things that are just not there
Chase left; Tulula was on his mind all night. He couldn’t shake her from his mind; he thought he was going mad. Had he really heard and seen her? He dreamt about her the following morning; he met his friend Carl at the mansion
“This place is magnificent”
“yeah”
Are you ready for your big opening?”
“I don’t know
“What? You have been hyping on about this and how much this house is going to give you”
“Yeah, that was before”
“Before what? What’s wrong?”
“You are going to think I’ve gone crazy, because I think I’ve gone crazy
Carl looked at Chase with curiosity
“OK, here goes: Tulula paid me a visit”
Carl laughs “What? Yep, you’re going crazy”
“Carl, I’m telling you”
“You are obsessed with Tulula Fontaine; you have been for years, and now you have her house; your imagination is playing havoc with your mind
“Nooooo”
“Yesssss, Chase”
After Carl and all the workmen had left, Chase did his nightly checks. He approached her bedroom; her wedding dress and veil were still on the mannequin; her shoes sat beside on the floor; his mind drifted to how beautiful she would have been in her wedding dress; he made his way down the stairs and he turned to look at her picture at the top of the staircase
The canvas, once teeming with her likeness, was now a blank expanse of pale, dried linen. Chase stumbled back, his breath hitching as the temperature plummeted. From the top of the stairs, a figure began to descend. She moved not with the heavy gait of a human, but with the fluid, gliding silence of a shadow reclaiming its territory.
She wore the same black dress as in the portrait, but the fabric seemed woven from the darkness itself. As she reached the landing, the mist parted. Her brown eyes were no longer painted; they were alive, fathomless, and burning with a cold, ancient fury.
“You speak of me as if I am coin,” Tulula whispered, her hand—cold as tombstone marble—brushing against the bannister. “You seek to sell the ghost of my life to the masses?”
Chase tried to run, but his legs felt leaden, rooted to the floor by an invisible, suffocating weight. The goddess of the silver screen leaned into his space, her scent overpowering—the smell of jasmine, clove, and the damp earth of a grave.
“I didn’t leave this house, Chase,” she murmured, her sharp fingernail tracing the line of his jaw. “I simply waited for someone to become part of the exhibit.”
“Noooo Im not seeing you”
“Chase, you are; I’m here, here with you”
“Noooo” he closed his eyes, thinking she wouldn’t be there when he reopened his eyes.
“He pushed me. I didn’t fall”
“Who
“Claud Garcia, the man I was going to marry, he was stealing from me, taking my money. I confronted him, telling him I was calling the police, and we fought. He was too strong, and he pushed me”
“Ohhhh, Tulula “
“You are the only person that will ever know the truth”
“They will; I’ll make sure of that. I must go”
“Noooo”
The foyer doors slammed shut with a finality that shook the foundation, and as the mist swallowed the room whole, Chase realised with terrifying clarity that the house would never be opened to the public. Not while Tulula was still hungry.
“No, you never leave me, Chase”
He felt a hand—cold, solid, and impossibly heavy—rest on his shoulder. He gasped, his knees buckling. He didn’t make it to the bottom of the stairs, not in the way he had planned. As he tumbled, his body racking with the same jagged pain that had claimed Tulula forty years ago, he realised his mistake. He had come here to commodify her death, to sell her tragedy for profit. But Tulula hadn’t left this house, and she wasn’t a relic to be displayed. She was a warden.
As his vision blurred and the darkness encroached, the last thing Chase saw was the shadow of a Tulula standing over him, her long black hair swaying in the draft. He hadn’t bought the house. The house, and its beautiful, tragic inhabitant, had finally acquired him. The tours would never start; there were no more stories to tell, only the perpetual, silent loop of two souls trapped in the time he had been so foolish enough to disturb.
Thank You For Reading
Deborah C. Langley
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