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The Martense Family are the main antagonists of H.P. Lovecraft's 1922 short story The Lurking Fear.
History
The Martenses were a Dutch family originally living in the colony of New Amsterdam. They moved to Tempest Mountain in the Catskills in 1670 as their patriarch, wealthy merchant Gerritt Martense, wished to avoid encroaching British rule. Gerritt built a mansion on Tempest Mountain in order to avoid unnecessary contact with the locals, fitting a well-fortified cellar to take refuge from storms after realizing that Tempest Mountain was especially vulnerable to such weather.
Less is known of the following generations of the family, as all were raised to hate the English colonists and shunned the locals, who were more accepting of the colonists. It is known that members of the family rarely left the mansion unless they absolutely had to, to the point of interbreeding with servants and each other rather than marrying outside the family. Members of the Martense clan were marked by their distinctive eyes, with one eye being blue and the other brown. Isolation from society made them slow in speech and comprehension, with a strange responsiveness to storms. Many members of the family eventually left and moved to the other side of the valley, where they mated with the non-white population, but the rest stayed in the mansion.
Much of this information reached the outside world through Jan Martense, a young member of the family who joined the colonial army. When he returned in 1760, he was treated as an outsider by his family, not least because he no longer shared many family traits such as responsiveness to storms. In letters to his Albany friend Jonathan Gifford, Jan wrote of his intent to leave the family. He abruptly stopped writing in spring 1763 and Gifford visited Tempest Mountain to investigate. Arriving on September 20, he was shocked by the decrepit condition of the Martense mansion and the animalistic aspect of the family. When he asked, the family told him Jan had died after being struck by lightning and showed him the grave. Gifford was suspicious due to the family's sinister behaviour and dug up the grave, finding that Jan had been beaten to death. The Martenses could not be convicted due to lack of evidence, but were shunned by even the few people still willing to do business with them. They soon disappeared altogether, with the only evidence of their existence being lights occasionally seen in the Martense mansion as late as 1810. The mansion was eventually searched in 1816 by squatters descended from offshoots of the family when they noticed the absence of life, finding that the mansion was uninhabited and seemed to have been for some years.
Over the next hundred years or so, rumours spread in the local area of a monster or monsters attacking lone wayfarers in the dark, either carrying them off or leaving their gnawed, dismembered remains behind. Blood trails were reportedly seen leading towards the abandoned Martense home. The creature or creatures, known as the "lurking fear" by locals, usually struck during thunderstorms. These rumours were universally believed in the Tempest Mountain region, but were largely disbelieved and ignored in the outside world.
This changed in July 1921, when a nearby squatter's village housing around 75 people was destroyed in a storm. There were no survivors. It was quickly surmised that the storm had not been the cause of the destruction; the ground was covered with the flesh and viscera of the victims, and the corpses were covered in claw and bite marks. 25 of the townsfolk were missing and were never seen again.
A monster hunter heard of the massacre in the newspaper and travelled to Tempest Mountain the following month to investigate. His investigations immediately focussed on the abandoned Martense mansion, with the hunter and two companions, George Bennett and William Tobey, taking up residence in Jan Martense's room. All three fell asleep despite their careful preparations to avoid this, and the hunter later woke up to find Bennett and Tobey missing. In a flash of lightning he saw the shadow of a hideous monster retreating into the darkness outside. The hunter fled, but returned to the mountain a few days later with journalist Arthur Munroe to continue the investigation. When a thunderstorm hit, they were trapped in an isolated cabin that was struck by an unusually large thunderbolt. When Munroe went over to the window to survey the damage, an unseen creature waiting outside attacked and bit his face off.
Now even more determined to solve the mystery, the hunter returned once again a few weeks later after delving into the Martense family history. Convinced the lurking fear was somehow connected to the Martenses, and suspecting the ghost of Jan Martense, he dug up Jan's grave in the hope of laying his spirit to rest. Instead, he fell into a large underground burrow, where he encountered a grotesque, goblin-like creature. He was saved when the burrow was struck by lightning, distracting the creature so that he could escape. Upon escaping he saw a distant red glow, and asked nearby squatters about it a few days later. The squatters told him that the glow was emanating from a squatter town, where another creature had attacked; the glow had been the result of terrified locals setting a cabin on fire with the creature trapped inside.
The hunter returned a final time to the Martense mansion, finding the burrow completely caved in. He decided to investigate strange mounds surrounding the mansion and realized that they were in fact more burrows made by the creatures. Digging into one of the tunnels via the cellar, he uncovered a catacomb-like system of passages. Another thunderstorm soon hit, and the hunter saw thousands of the creatures emerging from the burrows. A weaker member of the mob was fallen upon and eaten alive by its compatriots. Under the cover of the storm, the hunter covertly followed the monsters and shot one, using a thunderclap to disguise the noise of his gun. He examined the corpse and saw that it had one blue eye and one brown eye. To his horror, he realized that the creatures were the Martense family, centuries of isolation and inbreeding having reduced them to feral, inhuman creatures. Thoroughly traumatized by his experiences, he went to Albany and rounded up a group of men who blew up the Martense mansion and the whole top of Tempest Mountain and collapsed all the discoverable underground tunnels. The hunter hoped that this would wipe out all of the Martenses, but feared that creatures like them could exist all over the world.
