Deadtime Stories

Easter Special

THE MAN ON EASTER ISLAND

It's just a legend.

But...I suppose...that's what most of those unbelievable things turn out to be...legends.

I heard this legend from my grandmother. I asked her about it when I saw her drawing the Easter Island heads on a piece of construction paper. Actually, when she found out that my dad never told it to me, she was a bit upset...I guess it's family tradition. She even made me promise to tell it to my children. My grandma originally heard it from her mother, who heard it from her mother...well, you know how these things work. It goes back in my family for as long as anyone can remember. You see, if you trace back my family far enough, you'd never leave the United States. The earliest official records of my family say that we started in Hawaii, but according to my grandma, we actually started out on anisland in the southern Pacific Ocean: Easter Island (or, as my grandma ordered me to call it, Rapa Nui). That's where this legend comes from—supposedly unaltered, exactly the way it was told centuries and centuries ago.

According to the legend, the people on Rapa Nui had always been in touch with the spirits. They had their ceremonies, they did their fair share of sacrifices, etc. Sure, these days the idea of sacrificing an animal to a god seems a bit crazy, but keep in mind that it was normal back then. It was all they knew; the civilization had worshiped the spirits that they believed walked among them since the dawn of time. (Well, actually, I should say "flew"...apparently, the spirits that my wise ancestors worshiped were actually giant, creator bird people. Not that I'm judging or anything.)

But then, after hundreds of years of the same traditions, the same ceremonial rituals, the same chants, the same animal sacrifices...something changed. The people started to see something. Every once in a while, someone would report seeing a man standing by them in the night. Occasionally, he stood at the edge of the forest and "watched" the people who dared to walk by alone. He could be seen in the shadows, in the water, in the trees, or even in the grass. Regardless of where he was or who saw him, though, he always looked the same. He was reportedly very tall and covered in wrinkly, dark grey skin. He had a long, almost rectangular head, but where his eyes should have been, he had two deep, smooth depressions surrounded by shadows. His giant nose was also rectangular, and the bridge sunk back into the shadows along with the eye sockets. His mouth, stretched into a long, dark frown, rested above a square chin. His arms were short compared to the rest of his body. They were nothing but stubs, but when he moved them, it seemed that he had at least 10 joints. (I asked my grandma if she meant like tentacles–she said no, because tentacles flow, and the man's arms were rigid and stiff.) Apparently, he had two legs, like any human, but they curled up and contracted like a worm until they were inside him. He didn't need legs, my grandma said, to be tall.

The first time somebody saw the man, the village thought he was insane. He talked nonstop about this man that only he could see. He tried to describe the mysterious figure and insisted that it was familiar to all of them, that they'd all seen it before, dozens of times. No one could understand the descriptions of the man, though. A week passed, and the man from the village saw the strange being (who, from now on, I will refer to as the Mo'ai) more and more frequently. But the more he tried to explain to his family what the Mo'ai looked like, the less they understood what he meant. Then, exactly a week after first seeing it, the man was found dead where he slept. The Rapa Nui people thought that their gods had struck him down for blasphemy, and they chose to never speak of him or the Mo'ai again. However, about two weeks later, another member of the village claimed to have seen the Mo'ai one night. She said that he didn't watch her, but simply stood over her, staring straight forward into the darkness. However, she also mentioned how the man who saw it before was absolutely right–now that she saw it, she knew it. She had known its face, with its sunken eyes, its pointed nose, its bald, wrinkled head, and its eternally closed mouth. The villagers thought that she had gone mad as well, and ignored her as she described the Mo'ai to them. A week after she first saw it, she, too, was found dead. She had eaten a poisoned berry by mistake.