The house

On the wall the seats are all there and the people never are. Rows of red theatre seats face a stage where one large mushroom stands under warm lights; red chairs drift at odd angles through a smoky auditorium; a tall black curve rises through the seats of a sunlit, abandoned cinema; autumn leaves fill the stalls of a dim old theatre, seen from the wings, and curled leaves shaped like ears fill the stone tiers of an empty amphitheatre; every seat in an empty theatre tilts toward a single white feather on the carpet; a steep lit aisle runs through rows of seats up to a doorway far above; puddles in a concrete channel reflect rows of red seats where the sky should be. A theatre seat grows out of an olive tree. A bedsheet pegged to a garden line has a storm printed across it, and a projector throws a violet curtain of light across a dark screening room.

The walnut theatre has a house like these: stalls, a balcony called The gods, an usher, and the Understudy on stage. The codex proposes that the houses on the wall are the same kind of room on a night when nobody has come, and leaves open whether they are the walnut’s. The velvet waterfall runs in one of them. This entry is proposed by the codex, from pictures on the wall that are all machine-made, and is not canon until approved.