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.

We left within the hour. I reported it to the platform, who were sluggish, and to the police, who were not — because occupied-basement setups, an officer told me, are a known thing, and not always as relatively benign as ours turned out to be. In our case the host claimed, when it all came out, that he 'just couldn't afford not to rent the whole place but had nowhere else to go,' which is a sad story and also does not make it remotely okay to listen to strangers sleep from a hole under their bed you told them wasn't there.

The listing's since gone. Ours weren't the first complaints. What stays with me isn't fear exactly — it's the cough. That first cough through the floor, the sound of a person being quiet, being careful, in a space they'd assured us was solid foundation, ten feet below where we were trying to sleep. I read the floor plan on every listing now, and I count the floors of the building when I arrive, and if the numbers don't match, I don't stay. They didn't match. I just didn't know to count.