by Jenny Twist
Alison just stared at him, unable to speak, her hand still clutched to her breast. He was an extraordinarily beautiful young man, with high, aristocratic cheekbones and sensitive lips. His eyes were a very dark brown, almost black, and they looked at her now with a hint of amusement as she struggled to regain her equilibrium.
“Perhaps you would allow me to escort you home,” he said, proffering his arm in an old-fashioned gesture.
Feeling as if she were in a trance, Alison took his arm and they walked off together into the gathering dusk.
She stopped as they got to the top of the street, and turned to him. Under her calm exterior she was horribly afraid. She knew who he was – had known from the moment she saw him. And now she believed it all, every word. Here before her stood the man who had killed her dearest friend and colleague. He looked like an angel, but was actually some dreadful, demonic, vampiric creature. And she was afraid, very much afraid, that his attention had now become focused on her new friend, Heather. But still she had to say it.
“Ignacio, did you know another English lady? Her name was June – June Blacker.”
Ignacio’s face lit up. “Juno,” he exclaimed. “My beautiful Juno. Do you know where she is?”
Alison reared back in surprise. “Don’t you know where she is?” she said. Then, mustering all her courage, “I thought you had killed her.”
An expression of utter despair crossed the young man’s face. “Juno? Kill my beautiful Juno? How could I do that? All I did was love her.” He raised his face to the sky, now fully dark, and all she could see were his eyes, glowing red. “They locked her away from me. The doors were shut against me. I have been calling for her ever since.” He looked down again, his face a mask of agony in the moonlight. “I call for her every night. But she does not come. Only the other one came. The one who cannot speak.”
Alison looked into his eyes – those dark eyes that had been black but now glowed red in the darkness – and what she saw was madness.
She turned and ran down the street, banging at the door and crying for Heather, terrified he would catch her before she could get inside. But when she turned and looked back, he was gone.
“It’s all true. I’ve seen him. He’s real.”
Heather was laughing at her. “Listen to yourself. You are seriously suggesting that this – vampire – killed June and nobody reported it to the police. They just sealed up the house with dog-roses and God knows what else – holy water probably – and waited for him to come back for them. Does it seem likely?”
“It’s not them he’s coming back for,” Alison said. “It’s you.”
Heather burst into a storm of laughter, her shoulders shaking with mirth.
“Look at yourself. Come on, have a proper look at yourself.”
“No!” Heather tried to pull away as Alison dragged her to the mirror.
“What size were you when we came here? Twenty-four, twenty-six?”
Heather muttered something that might have been ‘twenty-six’.
“Look at you now! You can’t be more than size eighteen. In less than a week, Heather. You’ve gone down five dress sizes in less than a week. What do you think could have caused that? There is no sensible explanation for that amount of weight loss.”
She stopped and stood in front of her friend, her arms crossed, her expression severe.
“We’ve got to go now. We’ve got to get out before he completely consumes you. Pack your things. I’m going to ring Johan.”
“No!” Heather screamed, and she turned and ran out of the house.
“Heather! Heather!” Alison screamed her name down the street – but she had gone. The night had swallowed her. For a moment Alison stood in the doorway, uncertain what to do. Then she went into the house and rang Johan.
The bar was crowded. Every man in the village and some of the younger women were gathered there. When Alison had run to him with her tale of the mantequero, Rafa had called the villagers together. Johan had arrived shortly after, his grey hair in disarray, as if he had been showering and not had time to dry it and comb it.
The men were angry, muttering and glaring at Alison and Johan.
“No,” Rafa said. “They did not bring the mantequero upon us. He was already here. The fat one, she has brought him out, that’s all. We have been given the opportunity to drive him into the open and kill him.”
Alison looked at Johan gratefully. When she had rung him with her garbled tale of vampires, he had not questioned her, but dropped everything and driven straight to the village. She had told him the whole story in whispers as they watched the villagers assemble and he had nodded, showing no sign of scepticism.
“You believe me?” she said. He nodded. “We are not entirely devoid of folk lore in The Netherlands,” he said. “And one can’t help thinking that there may be a basis for some of these tales.”
Now he sat very upright, facing the angry villagers, one hand firmly gripping Alison by the shoulder.
Rafa climbed on to the bar, his giant frame bending to allow him to stand.
“This is our chance,” he bellowed. “He is out there and he is not far away. We can hide behind our closed doors or we can seek him out.” He raised his eyes and looked directly at Alison. “This girl can take us to him.”
Alison looked around her in some alarm. “I don’t know” – she faltered.
“She saw him on the road tonight. She can take us to the spot.”
A ragged cheer went up and Rafa jumped down, seized Alison by the arm and began to march her towards the door. Johan, still holding her other arm, marched along beside them. “Come on,” Rafa said, “Which way?”
Alison hesitated, then pointed up the street, back up to the house. Behind them, the men lit torches and marched along in a straggling group. “Does it remind you of anything?” Alison whispered to Johan. He looked blank. “The last scene of Frankenstein, when the villagers march on the castle.”
They searched for hours, but they found no sign of Heather or the mantequero. She must have gone with him to his lair, wherever that was. Alison looked about in panic. “What are we going to do?” she asked Johan. “What are we going to do?”
He went to Rafa, who was standing a little apart from the others, mopping his brow and looking up into the high mountains. “Has anyone got a dog?” he said. “A dog that can follow a scent?”
An expression of delight crossed Rafa’s face. He grabbed Johan by his shoulders and laughed. “Good man.” Then, raising his voice, “Jeromo! Jeromo! Come here!”
One of the old boys shambled up. “Yeah?”
“Do you still have the old dog? The one that could find anything?”
The old man shrugged. “Sure, but he cannot track the mantequero. He does not know the scent.”
“No,” said Rafa, “but we have the scent of the fat lady.” The old man grinned. “Wait here, I will get him.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Johan, “and bring something of the fat lady’s.”
“Get her pyjamas,” Alison said. “They may have his scent as well. On her bed in the room at the front. Pink with white rabbits.”
They found them together just as dawn was breaking lying in a tangle of sprawled limbs, and dragged Heather away. She looked pitifully thin compared to her impressive bulk of a few days before. “Nooooo!” she screamed as they fell upon Ignacio with their pitchforks and scythes. Alison turned away and felt sick.
“What did they do with his body?” she asked Rafa the next day.
She had left Heather with Johan. She had not spoken since they brought her down from the mountain – just sat staring with an occasional slow tear trickling down her cheek.
“We cut off the head,” he said, “and threw it down the barranco. Then we staked the body and buried it under stones.”
“Staked it?”
“To stop it walking,” he said. “You cannot always kill these things, but you can tie them to the earth.”
Like vampires, she thought
. I always thought it was to kill them, but of course, they’re already dead. It’s to stop them walking.
“How is your friend?”
She smiled up at Rafa. “Physically she seems to be fine. She’s lost a lot of weight, but, quite frankly, she had a lot to lose. It is here.” She pointed at her head, “And here.” She pointed at her heart. “I think she will grieve for him for a long time.”
“She did a good thing for us,” Rafa said. “She led us to him. Maybe she will see it as a good thing one day.”
“I hope so,” Alison said, she turned as if to go, then turned back again. “What did you do with her, Rafa? With the other fat English lady?”
“La Señora? She is in the cemetery. I will take you.”
The cemetery was like a little village itself, with rows of tombs built into the walls, looking for all the world like streets of houses. Many of them had urns containing flowers or little shrines with a photograph of the deceased built into the end. The one right at the end of the row was bare. Alison laid a bunch of wild flowers in the niche and stood silently for a while thinking about her friend.
“I’ll look after Jessica for you,” she said. “And Patsy. I’ll bring Patsy out here one day to say goodbye.” Then she stood back from the tomb and walked briskly away.
“You will come back again?” Rafa asked, as he hastened to catch up with her.
“Oh yes,” she said, smiling up at him through her tears. “I’ll be back.”
Epilogue
“Did the mantequero love my Auntie June?”
Alison put down her knitting and gave the matter her full attention. She needed to choose her words carefully.
They were sitting in the living room of June Blacker’s cottage – soon to be Patsy’s cottage. Patsy, who was just learning to knit, was struggling with something lumpy and amorphous in a bilious orange. Alison was knitting something far more complicated and lacy in a delicate white yarn.
“I think he loved her in his own way,” she said at last.
“Then why did he kill her?”
All the trite phrases about killing the one you love ran through Alison’s mind, but she rejected them all.
“I don’t think he meant to kill her,” she said. “I don’t think he even knew he had killed her. He thought they’d locked her away from him.” She paused a moment. “I think he loved her to death.”
Patsy gave a little nod. “I like that,” she said. “It’s quite romantic, isn’t it?”
“Mmmm.”
Alison picked up her knitting again and executed a particularly difficult manoeuvre.
On the whole, she felt it had not turned out too badly. They had what the press called ‘closure’.
June Blacker had been an organised soul, much like Alison herself. She had left a will and a substantial trust fund for Patsy. The life assurance on the mortgage had been left directly to Patsy, which meant there would be no hold-up in payment. The fund allowed for monies to be available for the upkeep and maintenance of the house until Patsy was eighteen.
Right now they were in a kind of hiatus until everything was settled, but in the meantime they had decided to spend Saturday afternoons at the house together. Patsy had always spent her Saturdays with her aunt here in this house and Alison had thought it was a good idea to continue the practice. It would give her some stability, sticking as far as possible to familiar routines. She had, after all, just lost the woman who was more like a mother to her than her own mother was.
“Can I move in when all the paperwork is through?”
Alison smiled at the earnest little face under the brown fringe.
“I’m afraid not, darling. You can’t legally live on your own until you’re sixteen.”
“Well, could I live here with you?”
Alison remembered how much she had loved this house when she first saw it and how much she had wanted to be Miss Blacker. Not any longer. She was happy to be a substitute auntie to Patsy, but she did not want to take over Miss Blacker’s life entirely. There was a limit!
“No,” she said, “but we can always come here on Saturday afternoons.”
Patsy was silent for a while, then, “Tell me again about the village and what we’ll do when we go.”
“We shall stay in a nice little house in Orgiva, owned by a friend of mine, and he’ll take us up to the village and you can see the house where your Auntie June lived and we’ll take a photograph of her and some flowers and candles and we’ll make a special place for her at her grave. We could have a plaque made that said what she was like. Maybe ‘June Blacker’ and the dates and ‘she was the best teacher that ever lived’.”
“And the best Auntie.”
“Yes, and the best auntie.”
There was another silence.
“Will we book it at Heather’s travel agency?”
“Of course.”
“And will she come with us?”
Alison thought about the new, transformed Heather. She was now a trim size fourteen. For the first few weeks her skin had hung loosely on her new, slimmer frame, rather like that of a bloodhound puppy. But it had slowly regained its elasticity and now she looked wonderful. The experience had not left her too traumatised. She said herself she had not been in love with the mantequero. It had been purely infatuation. Had, in fact, seemed to be a dream until the last minute when Alison had made her face it. She had not wanted to let the dream go, but when it had all come to an end she had had no major regrets.
“No, I don’t think she will,” Alison said. “I think it will hold bad memories for her.”
And besides, she thought, holding up the almost completed matinee jacket to check the length, I don’t think she’ll want to fly in her condition.
THE END
ABOUT THE STORY
I first read about the mantequero in Gerald Brennan’s South of Granada, a book about his life in the Alpujarran mountain village of Yegen.
He tells the tale of how a tall, thin and very pale aristocratic friend of his was captured by some peasants when he was walking in the mountains. They were convinced he was a mantequero because he was so pale and thin, and were about to murder him on the spot, but decided, to be on the safe side, to take him to the mayor. Luckily the mayor was not so superstitious and told them he was not a mantequero but an Englishman.
I was very intrigued by this and did some research.
The Mantequero, also known as the Sacamantecas (Taker of Fat) and The Man with the Bag, is a creature of Spanish legend who comes in the night and sucks all the fat from your body. This he keeps in a leather bag which he carries with him at all times.
There isn’t a great deal written down about the supernatural being but, as with other kinds of vampire, real live people have been accused of imitating the mantequero, the most notorious being Juan Díaz de Garayo, who confessed to six murders but was probably responsible for many more. He was, however, only given the title ‘mantequero’ because a child he attacked was so horrified by his ugly face that she thought he was the sacamantecas (another name for the same creature).
A more viable candidate is Manuel Blanco Romasanta, born in 1809, who was a travelling vendor of fats used for greasing wheels. He was accused of using human fat in his products, but escaped justice and went on to murder a further nine people, inflicting horrible wounds and partially eating their corpses.
As recently as the summer of 1910, Francisco Leone, a healer, kidnapped and killed a seven year old boy with the sole purpose of extracting his blood and fat, for use in the cure of a third man suffering from tuberculosis.
But of the legend itself there is very little, so I felt justified in inventing my own mantequero.
In the first story, simply called Mantequero, I didn’t attempt to add much to the legend, merely suggesting that the creature appears at dusk. But of all the short stories I have written, this has evoked more requests for a sequel than any other.
At first I couldn’t see how I could write a sequel, since I had wr
itten myself into a corner with the first story. Then a dear friend suggested a possible way out and I was inspired to write it.
My problem was that this sequel got out of hand. It just kept growing and growing and instead of a short story it has become a novella. I wasn’t going to get away without fleshing out the legend a bit more.
I do not approve of making stuff like this up. If you write about a legend you should jolly well stick to the sources. But there aren’t any. This is, I think, an example of oral myth which has never been properly documented.
I’ve spoken to my friends in the villages here and they know very little about it (or they’re not telling). It could be that the mantequero belongs exclusively to the Alpujarran region of Spain. Or even that he has been forgotten now that modern technology has put all those other lovely stories in reach of the Spanish peasant farming communities.
So I have cheated. Where I have felt something must be explained, I have drawn on existing vampire myth.
If I have veered too far away from the real mantequero myth I apologise in advance.
But I think it works as a story and I really hope it will satisfy those readers who wanted more.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jenny Twist was born in York and brought up in the West Yorkshire mill town of Heckmondwike, the eldest grandchild of a huge extended family.
She left school at fifteen and went to work in an asbestos factory. After working in various jobs, including bacon-packer and escapologist’s assistant (she was The Lovely Tanya), she returned to full-time education and did a BA in history at Manchester and post-graduate studies at Oxford.
She stayed in Oxford working as a recruitment consultant for many years and it was there that she met and married her husband, Vic.