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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Nicky_XX on 2024-11-08 01:55:26+00:00.

I need to find DJ Erich Zann.  

Or, more specifically, the DJ formerly known as Erich Zann.  He’s changed his name; his Spotify and YouTube all his socials have been nuked.  He’s definitely left New York.  But he’s out there somewhere.  Making more of his strange, disynchronous, yet hypnotic music.  Building a new fanbase.  Luring them in, before… well, a repeat of what happened at The P***** in Bushwick.  

Twenty-nine people dead.  An electrical fire, the investigators claimed.  Faulty wiring.  You know how it is with these poorly-maintained, converted warehouses.  A fire, the local news repeated.  “Fire” was the story they were sticking to.  If anyone from the FBI or the CIA or any shadowy X Files agency knows any better, they aren’t saying anything at all.  

*****

A bartender buddy of mine, Andy, recommended me for the DJ Erich Zann gig.  

Dude you up to work a concert in Bushwick?  He’d texted me.  A guy called last night, said he found my business card.  But I’m already booked on the Lower East Side.  Pays $100 for the night, plus tips.  Really small gig, shouldn’t be much work.

I said I’d do it.  I recognized the address.  The P***** was an old warehouse at the ass-end of Bushwick, wedged into a corner between the Queens County border and the cemetery, surrounded by other abandoned warehouses - tagged up, with metal-roofed awnings and those huge roll-up doors you see on industrial properties.  The owners had re-wired and re-designed the inside, to be rented out for art shows, concerts, and club nights.  

Andy sent me a photo of the event’s promotional flier.  It was shiny black, with a childlike drawing of a stick-figure girl leading a huge, fluffy monster on a leash.  The design appeared cute at first glance, but the longer you looked at it, the more disturbing it became.  The monster’s crudely-drawn human face was too large for its body.  Its toothy mouth seemed less a friendly smile than a threatening sneer.  DJ Erich Zann.  10pm. 

I spent some time internet-stalking DJ Erich Zann.  The guy played up the mystique, for sure.  I found only one photo of the DJ himself, and it wasn’t a particularly revealing one.  Just a man, in a Cthulhu mask and turtleneck, standing behind a sound board, with long sleeves and gloves on his hands.  

I clicked into his YouTube.

DJ Erich Zann, the profile read.  We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity.  

H.P. Lovecraft.  He’d also stolen his stage name from an H.P. Lovecraft story.  Adorable.

I hit play on a video titled Asenath #14.  25K views; 1,500 likes; comments disabled.

The music started slow and low, pounding bass over a hazy, barely-perceptible electronic rumble.  On the video screen, against an empty background, bits of white light swirled and exploded and pulled back together, then split into pulsating stars in primary colors.  A trilling instrumental melody stretched over the repetitive bass-line, rising and falling and shooting off into a million different directions, as the colorful stars on screen spun like pinwheels, light blending and shifting and modulating, before a frenetic piping overcame the instrumental tapestry…

“Wow!  FIFTY percent off!  Bill’s Better Secondhand Furniture post-Labor Day sale!”

I muted my laptop as an ad replaced the hypnotic EDM melody.  Asenath #14 had been really short.  

Except, it wasn’t.  Asenath #14 was 33 minutes, 45 seconds long.  

I frowned.  No way I’d listened to that song for over a half an hour.  

*****

I called the number Andy gave me; no one picked up.  So, around eight thirty, I walked from the train station to The P*****, down an alley to the back parking lot and employee entrance.  There was clearly something going on - I could hear the thud, thud, thud of electronic bass.  But, unlike every other time I’d worked the venue, there were no roadies trudging in and out with heavy equipment.  There were no people around at all.  

No cars in the back parking lot either, except for one camper van.  That, in and of itself, wouldn’t be surprising - plenty of touring musicians live out of vans.  But this one was odd because it was completely blacked out.  I’m not talking about tinted windows.  Someone had taken the effort to cover every spot where light might seep through with opaque, dull black material.  

Asshole’s committed to the aesthetic, I thought.

Even stranger, the rolling door of the loading dock was still closed and locked.  As was the employee door. There was a handwritten sign posted there: ABSOLUTELY NO ENTRY UNTIL 10PM.

My next thought was the one that, in a roundabout way, saved my life.

It went: screw that upside down, backwards and sideways.  

The promo fliers said the event started at 10:00.  Which meant, the moron who’d posted the sign assumed I’d be able to set up a full bar while dealing with a line full of guests wanting to get liqueured up before the show.  Lucky for me, I’d poured wine at a gallery popup at The P***** two weekends before.  And I’d forgotten to return the key.

The way The P***** is set up, the bar is in a separate, smaller backroom, connected to the showroom by a squat hallway.  The employee door opened into the backroom, where I found my crates of liquor already deposited on top of the bar.  The throbbing bass line I’d heard outside emanated from the showroom, rhythmic and looping.  I saw moving shadows.  I assumed the tech guys were all in there.  

I got to work organizing bottles as the last of the summer evening light faded to darkness, bass booming in my head, guiding my movements like a conductor.  An hour later, I had to pee.  I didn’t want to annoy the roadies, or piss off whoever didn’t want me in The P***** before ten, but the venue’s only bathrooms were in the showroom, and the building was isolated amongst a sea of empty warehouses, and my only other option was to whip it out in the parking lot.  

So I went.  At the end of the hallway, I froze.

There were figures setting up the stage, but they weren’t roadies.

They were pitch-black automatons shaped like naked, featureless, sexless humans; mannequins at the mall become animate.  Their skin looked the consistency of clay.  They moved fluidly, more organic than robotic.  There were six of them.  Each had arms and legs and, in lieu of a head, a cube-shaped protuberance emitting small peals of grey smoke as they lifted crates of lights and arranged amps on the main stage.

I yelped.  I backpedaled.  My foot caught on something; I stumbled, a weight gave way, and the music stopped.  I realized the looped bass-line had come from a laptop, plugged in on the floor.  I’d tripped over it.  I’d hit a button or two.  I’d killed the music.  

SLAM!  CRASH!

Metal framing was dropped.  The sound board hit the elevated stage with a hollow THUD!  Everything the claylike, pitch-black, humanoid faux-roadies had been carrying fell to the ground.

As the faux-roadies themselves melted, like butter in a pan, into gelatinous black puddles.

*****

After The P***** incident - after that night - I scoured the internet for people who knew DJ Erich Zann.  People who could explain to me who he actually was.  Or who he’d been before he was DJ Erich Zann.

He kinda just appeared on Spotify in 2021, one Redditor wrote.

I thought he was an AI, said another.  

Didn’t he die in a fire at his concert in Brooklyn?  Asked yet another.  I dunno, maybe start there?  His family must’ve said something.

His family - if they existed - hadn’t uttered a word.  I’d scoured the internet for an actual photograph of DJ Erich Zann, or even a recording of his voice, and came up with nothing.  

Finally, User Gregg87 direct messaged me.

DJ Erich Zann was my roommate, he wrote.  I’ll be in NYC next week for Tech Week.  I can tell you everything.  

*****

Gregg87 is a real guy, with a real name and a family and a life in Pasadena, California.  But for privacy purposes, I’ll refer to him here as, simply, Greg.  Greg is an aerospace engineer with a Master’s degree.  We met at a quiet coffee shop in Williamsburg.  He’d known DJ Erich Zann while they were both college students in the late two thousands. 

“James Hadley,” Greg told me.  “That’s his real name.”

James Hadley and Greg shared a Pasadena apartment, a few blocks from the university they both attended, during Greg’s senior year of college.  James, though a year younger, was already three years into a Ph.D. program in theoretical physics.  Their residential situation had been arranged by university student services; for half a semester, Greg said, it felt more like living with a skittish cat than another young adult.

James spent every minute he wasn’t on campus barricaded in his room, working through equations or practicing his electric violin with headphones in.  Whenever he inadvertently found himself in the same room with Greg, he’d lower his eyes and scurry away like a cockroach in the light.  

Greg felt sorry for him.  He made it his mission to befriend his reclusive roommate, approaching the task as one would set about domesticating a feral pet.  Greg stopped studying in his room; instead, he’d arrange himself on the couch in the common room, hook his laptop to the TV, and play old Star Trek episodes as background noise.  On the rare occasion James emerged from his room, Greg would invite him to sit and watch.  At first, James might linger for a few …

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