Compared to outside, the inside of the bungalow was suffocating. Mostly because the only place air flowing in through was the window he had cracked open a few minutes ago.
It smelled mostly like dust, then an addition of rotten food stuff, dead rodents, and the lack of air just made everything worse.
For a minute, he could suddenly feel his eyes get heavy, and he found himself stumbling around the house, moving back to the cracked window, gasping for air.
For a human being like himself, the air was too little in a place without cross ventilation. He felt extremely dizzy the more time he spent without oxygen in his system.
The deeper he went, the harder it became for him to breathe, forcing him to crack more windows open. The air didn't circulate immediately. Rather, it took a while before it spread across the room.
His only worry was how he was going to survive when he went farther from the windows.
'I'll just hold myself and crack open more windows before I lose all the oxygen in my system.'
He moved forward, further away from the windows. For now, he found himself in the living room, and there was nothing much to see.
More than anything, it felt like a regular living room. Dead flowers on the centre table, a coffee cup, and old newspapers.
The chairs, sofas, and couches were all torn by either years of neglect or the act of the once living rodents around the living room. A small appliance stood at the end of the room, it looked like a box with a handle in front.
It was something he had never seen back at the clan before, and that's where he spent most of his life. He moved closer, curiously wanting to know what it was or what it did.
'The weird items I find in these places are concerning, the last one was a small cup and mirror, now a box? What could these people have been doing here in the forest? Moreover, where are they now? Why did they abandon all these and disappear?.'
He bent low in front of the strange box with a handle in front, staring at it for a while before reaching out and grabbing the handle.
He pulled the handle carefully, opening the box fully. The inside came into full view, on each cabinet was a dead rodent.
The smell hit him hard, veins bulging from his skin almost immediately as he struggled to breathe. He didn't waste a single minute, he closed the box and rushed to the closest cracked window.
Sticking his head through the window, and coughing his lungs out until his eyes became watery and reddish in colour.
"Great heavens!!!" He yelled. "What in the?!! Who drops a freaking rodent of that size in a box??! What kind of people lived here?!!"
"What would anyone be doing with rodents in the first place?! That doesn't look like something that snuck in there."
He stared at the box with disgust, his mood changing almost immediately. His next thought was to turn and leave the place immediately but he couldn't resist his curiosity.
He wanted to explore and find out more about the shed, maybe it was his childish self taking control or it was just his curious side wanting to know more, even though there was a possibility of getting into trouble.
But he ignored it all, after all the phrase went "Curiosity killed the cat". He decided to go further and gather more items he could find, and if possible gather knowledge as well.
'Alright.' He took two deep breaths. "Let's do this!"
He stared back at the living room, then took one step inside. Avoiding the weird box this time around, the deeper he went he searched for more windows to crack.
In any areas that didn't have windows, he simply avoided them to avoid suffocating himself to death.
From his observation, the bungalow housed a group of individuals interested in nature and everything within it. They had different specimens, the dead rodents in the box included.
On one of his visits to the rooms, he found a talisman in one of them. It was golden, with a green leaf outline in the middle, and it was sitting on a reading desk close to a window.
It was shaped in a deltoid form, with a chain cross-hatched around it. It looked pretty and since there was no owner to it, he decided to keep it for himself.
He dipped it inside his pocket, then went across to another room in search of more items. Surprisingly, the inside of the bungalow seemed bigger than it looked outside, not that he knew why it seemed that way.
There were a total of three corridors leading to separate rooms, three rooms in total on each corridor and he had successfully searched through the two corridors, with the rooms included.
The only one left was the last corridor, which went down a staircase. At first glance, with no light and surety of the windows down there, he wanted to turn around and head out with the talisman he managed to find but the possibility of finding more items crossed his mind.
He found himself staring down the staircase, letting his conscience decide for him.
'Go ahead. No, do not, go back.' He thought to himself over and over until he came to a conclusion and went down the stairs.
As he expected there was almost no oxygen below, and he couldn't see anything properly either. He spent his time staring into the darkness until he gave up and went back up the stairs.
"Well, at least it was worth the try but there's no way I can see in there and no one's gonna tell me twice that it's not safe."
He went back to the living room with a disappointed look, he stared down at the talisman he found. It was kind of disappointing that that's all he could find in a place like this.
"Oh well…" A sigh escaped his lips, stretching his arm behind him.
Before he stepped out of the bungalow, he turned and glanced at the living room, noticing something he hadn't seen the first time.
He moved closer and touched it to make sure he wasn't seeing things. "A coat?, But I'm sure I didn't see this the first time I came in here, how come?"
He glanced around the room, fear gripping his chest. "I'd better leave this place soon, I don't feel safe around here anymore."
He picked up the coat and rushed out of the bungalow through one of the cracked windows, leaving every other mystery behind.