The Host Lived in the Basement the Whole Time

'Entire home. You'll have the whole place to yourselves. I live across town.' The listing was emphatic about it; privacy was practically the selling point, and for a couple wanting a quiet week away, it was exactly right. The host met us, did a cheerful tour of the two floors, handed over the keys, and left. Or so we believed for about thirty hours.

Night two, late, the house dark, I was lying awake and I heard a cough. From below me. From beneath the floor of the ground-floor bedroom, where there was — according to the tour, the listing, and the two floors we'd been shown — nothing but foundation.

I lay rigid and listened, and over the next hour I assembled a horrible inventory of sounds I'd been half-hearing and dismissing since we arrived: the faint creak of movement below; a muffled cough; once, unmistakably, the tinny leak of headphones playing something; the soft clunk of what I now understood was plumbing serving a space we'd been told didn't exist. There was a basement. And someone was in it.

In the morning, as calmly as I could fake, I went looking, and found what the tour had skipped: a door in the side return, behind a wheelie bin, with a new-looking lock, and beneath the kitchen a section of floor with a draught and a light-switch that controlled nothing we could see. The host had shown us two floors of a three-floor house and rented us the upper two while living, silently, in the sealed basement below — entering and leaving, we later worked out, through the side door while we slept, listening to his guests through the floor of the bedroom he'd rented them.