The Night Circus
by Erin Morgenstern
Contents
Labyrinth
Overview
A visitor enters a shifting labyrinth inside the circus, moving from a playing-card corridor to a feather-filled chamber and then into a luminous white pine forest. With exits hidden and doors indistinguishable, the environment becomes disorienting and claustrophobic. The chapter emphasizes the circus’s seductive danger, ending on an eerie suggestion of an unseen presence.
Summary
An unnamed visitor walks through a narrow hallway papered in playing cards, lit by swinging lanterns made from more cards. At the end, the visitor reaches a spiraling iron staircase and chooses to climb upward.
The staircase leads to a trapdoor that opens into a room filled with drifting feathers. As the visitor passes through, the feathers fall and cover the floor door, hiding the way back.
Faced with six identical doors, the visitor chooses one at random and enters a space saturated with the scent of pine. The new room is a forest of bright, white evergreen trees glowing against surrounding darkness, and the visitor quickly loses any sense of the walls or boundaries while trying to navigate forward.
As the visitor pushes through branches in search of another door, an unsettling sound—like a woman laughing, or possibly only the trees rustling—echoes nearby. The visitor feels warm breath on the neck, but when turning to look, finds no one there.
Who Appears
- Unnamed visitor ("you")Second-person participant; wanders the circus labyrinth and senses an eerie, unseen presence.