Bailey spends the early evening with Poppet and Widget exploring the Labyrinth, a shifting series of rooms and corridors that includes snow-filled halls and odd chambers. Widget narrates the tale of the Minotaur until they become trapped in a metal birdcage room whose floor-door locks shut. After searching, Bailey finds a hidden key inside the seat of a swing; turning it lifts the swing and opens the cage roof, letting them climb into a dim temple guarded by an albino sphinx, and Poppet quickly chooses a door that returns them to the circus.

With the twins late for their performance, Bailey wanders alone and discovers an unmarked slit in a tent wall tied to a ribbon with a postcard-sized tag reading “Bedtime Stories.” Inside, he finds a starry ceiling over a long table and shelves crowded with jars, bottles, and boxes. Opening containers releases vivid sensory “stories”: a winter holiday memory; a seaside adventure with hints of pirates and mermaids; a garden walk with roses and unseen footsteps; and a small bottle that turns unsettling, carrying caramel, masked crowds, and a flash of pain and falling. A final box offers a luxurious, desert-like reverie before a sudden touch startles Bailey and makes him leave.

Outside, Bailey lingers near a living statue performer: a pale woman in a gown covered with handwritten love letters, holding her hand out. A young woman in a red scarf offers a crimson rose, and the statue slowly accepts it, lifting it toward her face. Poppet arrives and calls the statue her favorite, explaining she is known as the Paramour and “doesn’t look complete” without a flower.

Walking toward the courtyard, Bailey mentions the strange bottle-tent, and Poppet reveals it is Widget’s tent, made by Celia as a way for Widget to store his stories without writing them down. Poppet adds that Widget sometimes practices “reading people” to collect fragments of stories, often in places like the Hall of Mirrors or the Drawing Room, a chalk-covered tent where patrons draw and write on black walls.

They share spiced cocoa, dumplings, and edible illustrated paper, then wander through a mist-filled tent of animated paper creatures, including rumors of a fire-breathing paper dragon. As the night grows later, Bailey notices many patrons wearing red scarves; Poppet explains they are the rêveurs, devoted followers who travel with the circus and use the red scarves to identify one another. She then pulls Bailey into the all-white Ice Garden—frozen flowers, pale trees shedding snow, and bubbling ice—where she proposes hide-and-seek and slips nearly out of sight in her white costume as Bailey chases glimpses of her red hair.