The Last Blacklight Playlist

By the time the first body was found in the server room, the club had already sold out three nights in a row.
The Atrium sat beneath a decommissioned shopping centre in Leeds, down where the old delivery bays were and the lifts never quite worked properly. It had started as a warehouse venue, then become an underground club, then a “multi-sensory event space” once the developers discovered that people would pay more for a black room with a premium ticket and a fog machine. On Fridays they ran drum and bass. On Saturdays, techno. On Sundays, a brunch that no one trusted.
Nina Calder worked there because rent had turned cruel and because she liked nights better than days. She was a sound engineer by trade, though most weeks she was more accurately a woman who kept expensive equipment from being stolen, overheated or drenched in cheap lager. She knew every cable in the place, every dead zone in the lighting rig, every patron saint of badly wired sound systems.
The blacklight playlist was her idea.
It began as a joke after a power cut during a private hire. Someone had accidentally triggered the emergency UV tubes and the whole room glowed corpse-blue, all the white shirts and teeth and spilled vodka lit up like evidence in a morgue. Nina, standing in the booth with a torch in her mouth and a spanner in her hand, realised the emergency lighting made the dance floor look better than the designer package the owner had paid for. So she built a playlist around it. Fifteen tracks with savage bass, hard strobing breaks and long, insectile builds that suited the UV tubes. People loved it. They came for the sensation of being revealed.
They called it Blacklight.
She made sure the playlist was physically stored on the booth machine, mirrored on a cloud backup, and locked behind her admin credentials. She did not, under any circumstances, share access.
Which was why, when the opening track changed halfway through a Thursday warm-up and started to play a song she had never loaded, she felt her stomach go cold.
The song was not wrong in an obvious way. It had a beat. It had a pulse. It even had the right tempo, if not the right feeling. But beneath the kick drum was something like a low human breathing, chopped and looped so tightly it seemed to stutter in time with the sub-bass.
Nina stared at the screen.
TRACK 16
LAST BLACKLIGHT
UNKNOWN SOURCE
She tapped the touchscreen. Nothing. The file name shimmered, then resolved into a string of characters she could not read. The waveform was flat at first, then grew teeth. She hit stop. The track kept playing.
“Did you add something new?” asked Jamie from behind her.
He was one of the barbacks, nineteen and permanently over-caffeinated. He had dark curls and the nervous habit of checking his phone while speaking, as if afraid he might be missing a better conversation elsewhere.
“No,” Nina said.
“Sounds sick.”
“It shouldn’t exist.”
He laughed because he thought she was joking. She turned the monitor towards him. The track was still playing, though the counter had reset and the name had changed again.
NOW PLAYING
THE LAST BLACKLIGHT PLAYLIST
“That’s weird.”
“Yes,” said Nina. “It is.”
She killed power to the booth. The music did not stop.
For a second the room beyond the glass continued as if nothing had happened. The cleaning crew were still mopping up the back corridor. A pair of tourists in glittering tops leaned against the bar, bored and bright-eyed. Then the bass line deepened, and the wall-mounted speaker nearest the booth gave a wet crackle. Everyone in the club flinched at once, heads turning towards the ceiling as though a hand had snapped a chain.
The track was coming from everywhere.
Nina yanked open the machine casing. Dust, LEDs, cable spaghetti. The system light was green. The playback software displayed the song title in a font she had not installed. A second line appeared beneath it.
PLEASE ADJUST THE LIGHTS
She took a step back so fast she struck the counter with her hip.
Jamie peered over her shoulder. “Is that, like, a hack?”
“Get Marcus,” she said.
Marcus was the venue manager, which meant he spent his life smiling at landlords and pretending late deliveries were part of a creative process. He arrived in a fitted shirt, hair slicked back, phone in one hand and a reusable coffee cup in the other. The music was loud enough now that he had to raise his voice to be heard.
“What’s the problem?”
Nina showed him the screen.
He frowned. “Some promo thing?”
“I didn’t authorise anything.”
He glanced from the monitor to the dance floor, where people were beginning to move in that uncertain way clubbers do when they can sense an unscheduled shift in the night. The lights dimmed and the UV tubes flashed on in a hard white-blue wash.
Then the vocals started.
It was not singing. It was a boy’s voice, close-mic’d and damaged, breathing into the beat in short, terrified bursts.
Turn the lights down.
No, not those.
The other ones.
A woman near the bar started laughing, thinking it was a sample. A man in an expensive jacket lifted his drink and whooped. The voice repeated, lower now, as if coming through flooded wiring.
Please.
Nina slapped the booth door open and ran down to the floor.
The UV tubes should have been off. Instead they were burning brighter than before, turning skin to wax and the white trousers of the dancers to ghostly flares. Under the light, the crowd looked strange in the way all crowds do when they stop being a crowd and become separate creatures: sweating, blinking, chewing, frowning, unaware of the thing coming apart above them.
The lights in the far corners were wrong.
Not dark, exactly. More like a darkness with depth, a blacker pocket inside the black room. As Nina watched, one of those pockets shifted. Then a hand emerged.
The hand was pale under the UV. It reached down from the ceiling grid, fingers spread, as if someone were searching blindly for a rail. No one else seemed to see it yet. Two women on the dance floor collided and swore at each other. A man with silver eyeshadow filmed himself mouthing along to the vocals. The hand flexed once, and the fingernails were blackened, blunt with grime.
Nina stumbled backwards into a table.
“Marcus!” she shouted.
He was at the far end of the bar now, arguing with security. He heard her only when she grabbed his sleeve and pointed up.
The hand vanished.
He stared, then frowned at her. “What?”
“Did you see that?”
“See what?”
The music surged. The room vibrated with a bass note so low it seemed to press the air into the lungs. The woman in silver eyeshadow stopped filming and began to scream. That did it. The spell broke. People started looking up. A few laughed nervously. Then they saw the thing in the ceiling.
It was not a person exactly. It looked like someone had found a way to fold a human shape into the infrastructure above the dance floor. A torso, a shoulder, a leg with the skin scraped raw. It moved in jerks, dragging itself through the open maintenance panel, and when the UV lit its face the crowd saw that the face was skinless around one eye and split at the mouth, as if peeled back by heat.
The first people to bolt were trampled at the exit.
There was screaming, suddenly huge and ragged.
Marcus shouted at security to open the side doors. Nina was already running for the backstage corridor because she knew that if a thing had entered through the rigging then more than one thing might be there. Behind the club’s visual wall, the maintenance stairwell smelt of hot dust and damp concrete. The music followed her into the corridor, muffled but insistent, and then she heard it again under the beat.
Breathing.
Upstairs, in the roof space.
She climbed the metal steps two at a time, torch in her mouth. The music made the stairwell shiver. At the landing she found the access hatch hanging open. Beyond it, among the bundled cables and ventilation pipes, a row of tiny blacklights was glowing.
She had not installed them.
They were clipped neatly to the conduit like teeth. One of them flickered as she approached, and in its centre was a live camera feed of the dance floor. The image had been overlaid with an interface she did not recognise. Circles marked moving bodies. Names hovered over some of them.
Nina.
Marcus.
Jamie.
Then, beneath the names, one more line appeared.
SOURCE DETECTED
A scream rose from the floor below and cut off abruptly.
Nina pulled the nearest blacklight free. It was warm. Too warm. On the back, stuck to the battery pack, was a strip of masking tape with handwriting on it.
DON’T LET IT SEE YOU CLEARLY
She turned the light over. The plastic casing was scratched, and in the scratches something had been carved with a point so fine it looked like a needle: a row of tiny tally marks, dozens of them, followed by a date from three weeks earlier.
The date of the first missing cleaner.
Nina swore and ran back down.
By the time she reached the main floor, the exit doors were jammed with bodies. Someone had thrown a chair through the glass and the crowd was trying to pour out that way. Security were shouting. The lights were cycling now, not with any programmed rhythm but in brief, savage pulses. With each flash the faces in the room seemed to change position. People were stumbling over each other, slipping on broken glass, losing shoes. The music had become a single grinding loop.
On the screen above the bar, the playlist was visible to everyone.
TRACK 16: LAST BLACKLIGHT
TRACK 17: LAST BLACKLIGHT
TRACK 18: LAST BLACKLIGHT
The list kept growing.
Jamie was at the far side of the bar, white-faced, clutching a bottle he had not opened. “Nina!” he yelled. “It’s on my phone too!”
She looked. His screen was cracked and black with alerts. The same playlist title was open on his music app, though he had never used it to play anything in the club.
A notification popped up.
LIVE UPLOAD IN PROGRESS
“Get rid of it,” she said.
“I can’t.”
The app expanded by itself. The camera activated. Jamie shouted and dropped the phone as the front-facing lens filled with a dark reflection, then a shape behind him. He spun round too late.
A hand came down from the hanging speaker above the bar and seized him by the hair.
He screamed and hit the floor, both hands flying to his scalp. Nina ran for him, but the hand was not attached to anything she could make sense of. It came out of the speaker grille, long and wet as if dragged through drain water. Another hand followed. Then a face, bent, compressed, pushing itself through the speaker casing with obscene patience.
The face was human enough to be recognisable as fear. One eye had been stitched shut with black thread. The mouth was stuffed with shredded foam from the speaker cone.
Marcus grabbed an extinguisher and blasted the thing with powder. It did not let go. Jamie shrieked, blood already running down his temple where the fingers had ripped the skin. Nina seized a bar stool and smashed it against the speaker mount. The wood cracked. The thing inside recoiled, and Jamie tore free. He fell into her arms, sobbing, one side of his head slick and red.
People were still trying to escape. Someone had started a fire at the DJ booth. Maybe a flare, maybe a smashed power unit. A strip of blue flame ran across the carpet under the decks.
Then the lights went out.
Not emergency lights. Total blackout.
In the absolute dark the club became a thing with no edges, full of screams and hands and the wet sound of people colliding with each other. Nina felt Jamie clamp on to her wrist with both hands. Marcus was swearing nearby. Somewhere on the floor, glass was breaking under feet.
A light came on in the dark.
A blacklight.
It shone from somewhere high in the room, a single violet tube switched on by unseen hands. In its glow, every body was reduced to outlines and stains. The floor was littered with drink, blood and footprints. And standing among the moving crowd, visible only because of the UV, were shapes that were not quite human.
They did not need eyes. They moved by touch and sound. They were pale, raw-looking things in club clothes and maintenance overalls and half-finished costumes, their skin marked with old burns and the purplish bloom of UV exposure. One had a cable wrapped around its neck like a garrotte. Another had fingers fused together with melted plastic. They pushed through the crowd without haste, as though they knew exactly where each body would go when it panicked.
Nina understood then.
This was not a prank, nor a hack in the ordinary sense. Something had been watching the club through light. Through cameras. Through reflections. The blacklight gave it a way to map people, to isolate them, to make the dark useful to it.
And now it had enough.
Marcus found her arm in the dark. “Back corridor,” he shouted into her ear. “Now.”
They half dragged, half shoved Jamie with them through the staff door. Behind them the screaming grew worse, then more distant, then began to sound strangely orderly, as if people were being guided.
The service corridor was lit by one emergency strip. The walls sweated condensation. Nina could hear the music still, not from the club but from the vents. The playlist was spreading through the building.
At the end of the corridor was the server room.
The door was ajar.
Inside, the racks of equipment glowed faintly through the dark mesh fronts. Fans hummed. Cables ran like roots into the floor. On the central monitor, the playlist interface had opened itself across three screens. A camera feed showed them entering.
Marcus stopped dead. “No.”
In the feed, he was a few seconds behind himself, moving with Jamie slumped between them. On another screen, a figure stepped into view behind their own shoulders. It was impossible at first to tell whether it was a person or merely a smear in the camera glare. Then it turned its face directly towards the lens.
It was the club owner, Adrian Voss.
He had not been seen all night.
He was pale and thin as a blade, his expensive shirt streaked with blood from the collar down. One eye was swollen shut. The other shone with a peculiar, feverish focus. He smiled at the camera with the dreadful calm of a man who has already decided something and can no longer be reached by argument.
“I knew you’d come back here,” he said.
The words came from the speakers overhead and from the room itself. Nina’s skin prickled.
Marcus took a step forward. “What the hell have you done?”
Adrian laughed softly. “What I paid for.”
“You what?”
“Didn’t anyone tell you?” He spread his hands. “The club wasn’t the product. The playlist was. The light reaction data, the movement capture, the biometric response. People pay to be seen, Nina. We just gave them a cleaner way of being recorded.”
Nina stared at him. “Recorded by what?”
The answer came from behind the racks.
A shape moved in the black between the server cabinets, and the blacklights mounted on the ceiling clicked on one by one.
In that light the thing at the far end of the room was not a shadow but a person folded into a terrible crouch, all joints wrong, skin marked with the same burn-lacquer and stitching she had seen on the figures in the club. There was a USB cable jack-hammered into the flesh at the base of its skull. Its mouth was open around a mouthful of wire.
It turned its head with a sound like leather tearing.
Adrian’s smile widened. “Meet the curator.”
Jamie made a sound like a whimpering cough. Nina felt rather than saw Marcus backing away. The creature rose. Its spine clicked and lengthened. Under the UV, something pale and slick moved beneath the skin of its forearms, as if the body were full of cables.
Adrian spoke again, almost tenderly. “It doesn’t like to be interrupted.”
Nina looked from him to the monitors. The playlist on screen had become a video file. Not a song now but a sequence of live clips, dozens of them, stitched together in strobing jumps. Bodies in the club. Faces. Panic. The hand in the speaker. Jamie bleeding. The broken glass. Every expression of fear rendered into one continuous feed.
At the bottom of the screen a counter ticked upward.
UPLOAD COMPLETE: 98%
“What does it want?” she asked.
Adrian’s face changed. For the first time the confidence slipped and she saw something small and frightened beneath it. “It needs a clean run.”
Nina understood with sick clarity.
The blacklight playlist was not just a lure. It was training. A way of learning how people behaved in darkness, how they fled, where they looked, how much noise they made before they broke. The lighting rig, the cameras, the app permissions, the bar Wi-Fi, the mirrored storage. The whole place had been turned into a cage with a mirror on the inside.
“What did you sell?” she whispered.
Adrian said nothing.
The curator moved.
It crossed the room with impossible speed, not running so much as unfolding. Marcus shouted and grabbed a fire extinguisher from the wall, but the creature slapped it aside. The metal cylinder hit the racks and burst, filling the server room with white chemical fog. In the confusion Nina seized Jamie and dragged him behind a cabinet.
Something struck the cabinet hard enough to dent the steel.
Marcus screamed.
Nina looked round just in time to see the curator pin him against a rack. One hand closed over his face, the fingers entering the mouth and nose with a horrible ease. Marcus thrashed, heels drumming on the tiles, then went limp as the creature leaned in, listening to something only it could hear.
Adrian backed away, eyes wide now, his certainty dissolving. “Stop,” he said, though to whom it was unclear. “Stop it. I didn’t authorise this.”
The playlist counter on the screen clicked to 99%.
Then 100%.
The final file opened.
There was no sound from it at first. Only a black frame. Then the blackness resolved into a view of the club from above, from the roof space where Nina had found the hidden blacklights. The camera angle was perfect. It showed the dance floor, the exits, the server room door, everything.
And in the middle of the room, looking up as if he could see the lens, was Jamie.
Not the bleeding boy beside Nina, but another Jamie, already there in the feed, his face bloodless, his head half turned. Behind him stood Nina, and behind her Marcus, and behind Marcus a row of pale figures holding the crowd in place like livestock.
Nina felt her stomach lurch.
The feed was not showing the present. It was showing a version of the future, or a memory that had not happened yet. Around the edges of the frame, white text scrolled by.
THANK YOU FOR HELPING US SEE
The curator turned towards her hiding place.
Nina did the only thing she could think of. She pulled the blacklight from her pocket and smashed it against the floor.
The bulb burst in a spray of purple glass. A violent flash filled the room.
Everything changed.
The creature shrieked. Not because of pain, though perhaps there was pain in it, but because it had been exposed in a way it could not process. The screens bloomed white. The lights flickered. For one blind second every reflective surface in the room was a trap.
Nina screamed at Jamie to run and shoved him towards the door. She lunged for the server rack, found the main power trunk by feel, and wrenched it free. Sparks struck her wrists. The room lurched into darkness again, but now the darkness was ordinary and blind.
Adrian shouted her name.
She did not know whether he was warning her or begging her. A heavy body collided with the cabinet beside her. Hot breath washed her cheek. She swung blindly, felt her fist hit something soft and giving, and heard a wet crack. Blood sprayed her mouth. The smell was iron and mould and burned plastic.
Then the emergency lights came on.
Red. Dim. Honest.
In the red light the curator looked suddenly human again, and that was somehow worse. It was standing on Marcus’s body, one knee bent, head cocked, the cable in its skull twitching like a living thing. Its face had been split and stitched together with black thread in a rough imitation of repair. Its eyes were milky from the UV burns. It reached for Nina with the patience of a surgeon.
Behind it, Adrian was on the floor, clutching his throat. The creature had opened him from collarbone to navel with one hand. Blood pooled beneath his expensive shoes. He was trying to speak, but all that came out was a bubbling hiss.
Nina backed away until she hit the server rack. Jamie was gone. She could not tell where. The doorway was open. Outside, the corridor was full of red light and smoke.
The curator took one more step and stopped.
Something behind Nina was playing music.
Very softly. From the dead monitors.
The last track had restarted.
Nina turned.
On the screen, the black frame had become a live camera feed again. It showed the server room from above. In it she could see herself, red-lit and soaked in blood. She could see the creature. She could see Marcus’s body. She could even see Jamie, standing just outside the doorway, very still and very pale, his hands hanging loose at his sides.
And behind Jamie, another figure in the corridor.
Then another.
Dozens of them.
The blacklight playlist had not been a single weapon. It had been a broadcast.
The feed zoomed in on Nina’s face. The text at the bottom changed one last time.
NOW YOU ARE IN THE PLAYLIST
The corridor lights died.
In the darkness that followed, Nina heard the first of the figures enter the room with small, careful steps, as if trying not to wake something sleeping. She could not see them, only sense their breathing, the damp rasp of fabric, the faint click of cable against tile.
Someone touched her shoulder.
She did not scream at first. She had no breath left for it. The hand was cold and wet, and when it tightened she felt a thumb stroke the pulse at her neck with intimate interest.
Then the red emergency lights came back on, one by one, as if the building itself had decided to watch.
Nina looked up into the face of the thing behind her.
It was Jamie, but not Jamie as he had been. His eyes were open too wide. His mouth had been stitched shut with black thread. A blacklight was mounted inside the flesh at the base of his throat, glowing faintly through the skin. He smiled, because whatever had been done to him had taught him the shape of a smile.
And in the red light, all around him, the others were waiting to be seen.