Shadows Beneath the Monuments

BUY NOW

Washington, D.C., had always felt like a city with secrets. Tourists flocked to the grand marble monuments, and politicians whispered deals in mahogany chambers, but beneath the surface — in the cracks between history and modernity — something ancient stirred.

Evelyn had lived in D.C. for only three months when she met him.

She had come for a fresh start, working as a historical researcher for the National Archives. Late nights spent sifting through yellowed letters, official documents, and photographs had made her feel like a voyeur to history — but also like she wasn’t alone. The papers spoke to her, sometimes too clearly, as though whispering from beyond the page.

The first time Evelyn saw him was a cold October night at the Lincoln Memorial, where she had gone to clear her mind after hours of translating old letters from the 1800s. He stood near one of the columns, partially hidden by shadow, watching the tourists disperse. His silhouette was long and thin, and when he turned, his eyes locked onto hers with a hunger that made her shiver.

He didn’t approach. Not then. But something about his presence followed her home.

The Letters

Evelyn rented a small apartment in Foggy Bottom, the kind of place where the floors creaked with every step and the windows rattled when the wind picked up. It was there that the letters started appearing — tucked under her door, folded into her books, even once slipped into her coat pocket while she walked past the National Mall.

The handwriting was old-fashioned, elegant cursive in deep brown ink. The letters were unsigned, always beginning with the same chilling phrase:

“Do you remember me?”

At first, she assumed it was a prank — a historian with too much time on their hands. But the letters were oddly personal, referencing moments from her childhood she had never shared with anyone. Memories of her first lost tooth, the birthday party where she cried because her cake fell, the way she used to sing to herself when she thought no one was listening.

It was impossible. No one could know these things.

But the letters kept coming.

The Man in the Shadows

Evelyn began seeing him everywhere. Not just at the monuments, but on her street, outside the Archives building, in the reflection of the Metro windows. He always stood just far enough away that she couldn’t make out his face — but she knew it was him.

One night, unable to sleep, Evelyn descended the steps of her building for a walk. The autumn air bit into her skin, but she welcomed the distraction. Fog curled around the sidewalks, and somewhere distant, a church bell rang three times.

He was there.

This time, he spoke.

“You can hear them, can’t you?” His voice was deep and brittle, like paper burning in a fireplace.

Evelyn stood frozen. “Who?”

“The ones beneath the city. The ones who remember.”

She shook her head, backing away, but her heel caught the uneven sidewalk, and she stumbled. Before she hit the ground, his hands caught her — cold and strong, fingers that felt more bone than flesh.

When she looked up, his face was almost handsome — but wrong, somehow. Like a photograph decayed in water, features too soft around the edges, his smile too wide.

“Do you remember me now?” he asked again.

The Blood Pact of 1843

Evelyn buried herself in research, desperate to make sense of what was happening. The letters grew more unsettling. They shifted from fond recollections of her childhood to memories that weren’t hers — scenes from 19th-century ballrooms, candlelit parlors, and alleys slick with rain and blood.

Through archives, Evelyn uncovered whispers of an unrecorded ritual performed beneath the Capitol in 1843 — a covenant between a heartbroken lover and something ancient that slept beneath the Potomac. The lover, a woman named Clara Whittaker, had lost her fiancé to a duel over honor. Unable to bear the grief, Clara made a blood pact with a spirit dwelling in the old aqueduct tunnels.

The pact bound her fiancé’s spirit to the city, but not as he was — only as a fractured shadow, caught between death and memory, his mind eroding over centuries. The ritual went wrong, and Clara vanished, but the spirit remained — wandering D.C., seeking the one thing that could free him.

A heart that remembered him.

Evelyn began to wonder — was she somehow tied to Clara? Reincarnated, perhaps? But the letters told a different story. They addressed her not as Clara, but as Evelyn — always Evelyn.

“You made a promise,” one letter said. “You said you would never forget me.”

The Night Beneath the Capitol

The dreams started soon after. Dreams of tunnels lined with bones, of water seeping through brickwork, of a figure standing at the end of a long corridor, waiting with outstretched hands.

Evelyn knew where she had to go.

The entrance was hidden beneath an old maintenance hatch near the Capitol Reflecting Pool — a relic from when the city’s aqueduct system flowed beneath the National Mall. With only a flashlight and trembling resolve, Evelyn descended the crumbling staircase into the dark.

The air was heavy with moisture and something else — a scent like old flowers left too long in a vase. Her footsteps echoed, but there was something else beneath them — whispers, low and mournful, brushing past her ears like cold breath.

He was waiting at the end of the tunnel, just as in her dreams.

“I knew you’d come back,” he said softly.

“What do you want from me?” she asked.

His smile faltered. “To be whole again. To remember.”

He stepped closer, and she could see now — his form was constantly shifting, flickering between the man he once was and the shadow he had become. One moment a man in a black suit, the next a skeletal figure barely held together by shreds of memory.

“You were mine,” he whispered, touching her face with fingers colder than ice. “Before they took you away. You promised me forever.”

Evelyn’s heart thundered in her chest. This wasn’t reincarnation. It was something worse — a memory implanted into her very soul, a promise made in a time she could no longer recall.

The Choice

He offered her a deal — stay with him in the darkness, bound together beneath the city where no sun would ever touch them, or leave and let him fade forever, losing her memories of him along the way.

“Love is remembering,” he said. “If you forget me, I die.”

Evelyn felt the weight of it — a love story stretched across centuries, twisted by longing and corrupted by time. Did she truly love him, or was that love nothing more than a phantom memory, forced upon her by whatever ancient force he had called upon?

Her heart ached for him — this shadow who had once been a man, who had waited so long for her return. But fear gnawed at the edges of her compassion. Could she love something no longer entirely human? Could she trust that this was love at all?

Tears streamed down her face as she whispered, “I’m sorry.”

The shadow’s scream shattered the silence, reverberating through the tunnels as walls began to tremble. Bones crumbled to dust, water gushed through unseen cracks, and the darkness swallowed him whole.

As Evelyn fled the collapsing tunnels, she felt something slip from her mind — the letters, his voice, the memories. By the time she reached the surface, all that remained was the faint scent of flowers left too long in water and a deep, unexplainable sadness.

Epilogue

Years later, Evelyn would sometimes find herself wandering the National Mall at night, drawn by some unseen pull. The monuments shone against the night sky, their marble skin unblemished, their secrets hidden just beneath the surface.

She no longer remembered why the shadows beneath the city made her heart ache.

But somewhere, beneath the ground, a whisper echoed through the darkness.

“Do you remember me?”

And sometimes, just sometimes, she would turn — searching for someone she could no longer recall, in a city that had forgotten him too