MSF: The Farm (+ Unicorn Meat: the OST)

Joseph Rusling Meeker

Spend enough time in the speakeasies and watering holes of the Low Country, and you’ll hear a certain haint-story. It’s never the first one of the night; you need to build up to it, let the whiskey loosen a few tongues. It goes something like this:

Deep in the swamps claimed but not occupied by the Commonwealth, too far away from the roads for the Maid’s armies to raid it - even saints are beholden to supply chain logistics - lies an old colonial plantation left to rot.  

No one can agree on the name of the family, or on their circumstances, but everyone agrees that they were a very old family and once a very rich one. True scions of the Low Country gothic. Lurid details are added for seasoning: murders, suicides, poisonings, madness, hauntings, incest, prodigies, cults, demons and devils. The patriarch went mad and killed his family before hanging himself. The slaves knifed their captors in their sleep and vanished into the night. Monsters devoured them. There were curses laid on the land by the peoples who called the place home before the Empire came. The how doesn’t matter. 

The important part, the part that all tellers of the story agree on, is that the place is cursed. Sick. The sins committed on that land sunk into the soil and the trees and the water and it was never set right, never given catharsis. It festered. Grew. Poisoned the land so that nothing good or right can take root. The gods are not present here. 

Few will claim to have laid eyes on the place themselves: it’s always a passing stranger, friend of a friend, a cousin three hollers over, yet they’ll always have all the details. They’ll tell you how the manor home, rotted like a tooth, is still standing - mostly standing - in defiance of nature’s reclaiming green entropy.  Cut through the creepers and vines and you might find the skeletons of barns, slave quarters, outbuildings, bricks, stones, rusted iron, mottled verdegris.

They’ll say that the trees are sick here, black and arthritic like the knuckles of a peat bog burial. That one of them, dead center of the flat hillock of solid ground this is all built upon, reaches up lifeless branches as if to grasp the sun with its amigara fingers and tear it down from the sky. They’ll say you can still find trinkets in the red soil around its roots: bottles, jars, coins, nails, twine, fragments of corroded metal, shards of ceramic, splinters of bone.

They’ll say there’s one building the swamp will not touch: the factotum. An eyeless citadel, its metal walls gone the scabby color of the blood-soaked deserts of Angarag. The animals avoid it, and the plants don’t grow too close. Your head starts to swim if you stand nearby for too long. Whatever happened here, the worst happened inside that building.

The sane thing is to pack up and head home, but that’s not a good end to a story, now is it? The passing stranger, or friend of a friend, or cousin from three hollers over just has to poke their head into the darkness of its gaping gate. They cast their light over the dust and rust and filth for a moment before lifting their lantern high and raising their eyes to the far wall, where among the peeling and mold-spotted paint of some mural lost to decay, tall white letters read:

TELL THEM THAT WE WERE HERE

Bonus: Unicorn Meat Soundtrack

Go Tell Aunt Rhody [1]
(Resident Evil 7 OST) 

She's Back Again, She's Gone Again [2]
(Widdly 2 Diddly)

The following remixes of the LISA the Painful / Joyful soundtrack

• War Season (REMIX) - ChaChos [3]
• March of the Flies  (War Season Remix) - Space Communist 
• Big Lincoln Sends You To Hyrule - imperiousMarxist [4]
• End is Nigh Remix - RENREN [5]

Battle in the Warrens
(Stuart Chatwood, Darkest Dungeon OST)

Rise Up Dead Man 
(Port Sulphur Band, Hunt: Showdown OST)

In the Pines [6]
(Danny Farrant cover)

Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower [7]
(Bloodborn OST)

Brokentooth Venuz [8]
(Spewcup)

Betrayal 
(Silent Hill 2 OST)

Room of Angel 
(Silent Hill 4 OST)

Why Not [9]
(Ghostface Playa)

**

[1] I can very clearly imagine all the carvers emerging from their their cabins for that final chorus. 

[2] Honestly the entire soundtrack should be here. Special preference for War Season, Beehive, Roll the Dice, Bradley, Blood for Sex, and The End is Nigh. 

[3] There are a lot of extremely good LISA remixes out there, and a lot of very good War Season ones, this one stands out in a crowded field. That drop at 0:35 is *chef's kiss*

[4] This is White-Eyes boss music.

[5] This was originally a youtube video, now long deleted, by P4L MEN. Same person? I thought it really was lost for years at this point and then found it as I was putting all the links in. This is also White-Eyes’ boss music.

[6] I found this song through the trailer for SCP Confinement, which was probably the best introduction to the entire premise out there but because we cannot have nice things it was also made by totally different Persona-Non-Grata.

[7] Contact with the Beast Below.

[8] Not enough guns on the farm for this, but they've got the spirit for it.

[9] Squad goals