Right you are about it having a smell all its own. It is hard to describe. Something like a mixture of baked bread and citrus fruit and rot. My boss was in the habit of keeping quince fruit in his office as decoration back then, and I couldn’t stand the smell of the fruit after I found the dead guy.
It wasn’t so much that my nose got used to the smell. I was out of the appartment for twelve hours a day, after all. There just wasn’t enough smell to be disturbing until that last evening there when I finally opened the door.
Did I mention that I had gone to see “Army of Darkness” the night before I found the guy? Creepy. You go out and see a scary movie, and then find out the next day that you have been living one.