Hey, could you proofread this story for me?
Whenever I try to tell people about my job, they end up asking me: "Oh, so you're like a secret shopper for Airbnb?" No, not exactly. But, sure, more or less. When an accommodation gets bad enough reviews, they send in a "Compliance Associate" to make sure, at the very least, that there's nothing going on that the company itself could get sued over. It's not as bad as it sounds—a lot of those bad reviews are exaggerations. And the company covers my transportation, plus I get a per diem. But I do do have to stay at a lot of really lousy B&Bs. (I guess I'm supposed to stipulate that the company I work for isn't really Airbnb, that it's some tiny competitor that I can't name and that you've never heard of anyway, because I made it up. The thing is, who cares?)
A couple years back, I was assigned to check out a place up in the mountains. My regional purview is "Northern California," which my employers can stretch to mean anything past Encino. This house, though, was so far north it may as well have been in Canada. It was a long, cold, rainy drive, and I felt like I kept driving through the same town, with the same burger joint, the same church, the same abandoned gas station. But the highway kept climbing up, kept getting steeper. Eventually I turned off of of the highway and arrived in an old, damp town that smelled like a basement. It was as if the streets there didn't want to intersect; they wanted to twist further and further apart until they disappeared into the pines. At the end of one such street was the bed and breakfast I was supposed to investigate.
The terrain was steep enough that I had to park some distance away and make the rest of my approach on foot, ascending a zig-zag path of slick stone steps. I wondered whether I should put put the lack of wheelchair accessibility in my report, and the thought distracted me enough that I slipped a little and almost fell down the hill. I righted myself, made it to the door, and knocked. No answer. I called out a hello. No answer. I looked up at the building: In a window on the third or fourth floor there was a shape that might have been a face. It must have been a face; it slid out of view as soon as I looked. I knocked again, a little harder, and the door fell open. So I went inside.
This sequence of events wasn't all that unfamiliar to me. A lot of the places I visit aren't well-attended by the hosts (and, not to spoil a trade secret, but my job description entails a certain amount of not-technically-trespassing). At first glance, this house seemed abandoned. Furniture had been pushed pushed into corners; I saw footprints in the dust on the floor. But when I poked my head into the garage, I heard freezers humming. Two freezers, both with sheets of printer paper duct-taped to the front, reading, in some goofy font: "GUESTS PLEASE KEEP OUT :)"
As I backed out of the garage, I heard something somewhere in the house. Footsteps, maybe upstairs. Someone hurrying down a hallway, and then exclaiming in surprise or pain. I called out again, just like I had at the front door. I heard the voice upstairs shout again, and then more footsteps, but that was all. I started moving faster, looking for them, but I realized I didn't know the layout of the house at all. I didn't even even know if the noises I heard had come from upstairs.
But I went upstairs anyway. I found a long hallway with a window at one end, a painting of pine trees at the other end, and six or eight pairs of identical-looking doors in between. One door was open. I poked my head in and saw a low, skinny bed, and a bedside table with a vase of half-wilted flowers. Like I said, I've stayed in a lot lot of lousy B&Bs; I knew instinctively that this was my room for the night. Inside, I found a piece of paper on the dresser. In the same stupid font from before, it listed the rules of the house, including a reminder to stay out of the freezers in the garage. It also noted, semi-apologetically, that there was no lock on the door to my room. Not a big surprise. Under the circumstances, though, I pushed the dresser in front of the drawer before I turned in for the night. I did not sleep well.
In the morning, before I got out of bed, before I even opened my eyes, I tried to listen to the house for a while. I strained my ears for the sound of any movement. I tried to remember the host's name. The papers were all in the trunk of my car; I didn't want to blow my cover. I stood up and looked out the window, as if to make sure my car was still there, and I saw a man coming up the front walk. I watched him turn a corner of the stairs, watched him trip and almost fall. Eventually he got got to the front door, and I couldn't see him anymore, but I thought I heard him say something. Then he came back into view, craning his neck up at the house—I moved away from the window before he saw me.
I moved the dresser away from my bedroom door and went out into the hallway. I was weighing how much more snooping I wanted to do before I hurried back to civilization to make my report. But then I noticed a a shiny spot on the floor: a drop of blood. There was a trail of spatters along the length of the hall. I followed them to the open window, not noticing that the glass was broken until I cut my finger. I yelped and rushed back down the hall, looking for a bathroom or something where I might find a bandage.
I turned a corner and yelped again. An old man stood in front of the next door, heaving and twisting on the doorknob. His skin was deathly pale, almost blue; his clothes were stained and damp. I wouldn't want to guess how old he was. I asked him if he was the owner of the property. "What?" he squawked. "No, no. I'm supposed to be—" And then the door opened, something yanked him inside, and the door slammed shut.
Someone was coming down the hall behind me. I ran blindly past the door, up or down the first stairway I saw. There was another hallway, another flight of stairs. I heard the crash of glass glass shattering somewhere in the house. I turned a corner, then another, and then I saw that painting of pine trees again, and I realized I was back at the door to my room. I grabbed the doorknob; it wouldn't open. I leaned into it, trying to force the lock, but the door only budged a little.
Then, mercifully, a moment of clarity came over me. I turned around and began plodding purposefully down the stairs. The staircase seemed to stretch itself out with each step I took, but I kept taking step after step until I reached the bottom. I could still hear someone behind me, stomping in time with me, but at this point I didn't even even care. I didn't hurry, and I didn't look back. At length I stepped through the front door. I carefully descended the zig-zagging stone steps and got in my car.
I didn't leave anything out of my report. I didn't expect anybody to believe me, but I didn't see any reason reason to lie. I guess I was too angry to be worried about what anyone thought. To my surprise, my boss didn't flag my file, didn't ask for any followup questions. She just said my report was "basically what they expected," the host's listing got removed, and I found a nice bonus in my next paycheck.
Answer Checker:
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