"... doesn't there have to be something perceiving that nothing?"

nope--unless you use an already anthromorphic definition of "nothing"...like 'the absence of something which used to be here'...

***NOTHING***, tightly defined, is just that--nothing! How could something be observing 'nothing' without being aware of itself, and thus.....well, you get the idea.

In the introduction to Husserl's Phenomenology, he notes that the logically primary philosophical question is "Why is there something rather than nothing?" It is US who ask questions about what kinds of 'something' there can be, and there seems to a common perception that if something is named linguistically, it must exist.

It is a most interesting trick of self-aware, concious beings that they can weave semantic patterns about 'entities' that they have never seen and can't even explain how they might exist.

Read "The Urantia Book" or "Ohaspe" sometime, and be inundated with multiple levels of ethereal, cosmic nomenclature about stuff which relies on patterns of words, rather than real concepts, to create its spell.....

..."Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to perceive"
                  Bill D. 2004 (sorry, Sir Walter)