Perun left the apartment, thundering down the stairs and out onto the street. An open-top carriage was just passing, the women in large, plumed hats and one older man inside staring at him as they passed by at a trotting pace. He paid them no mind, darting out behind the vehicle and into the centre of a little square. Walking at a fast cut, he passed beneath the shade trees not bothering to tip his hat to the people taking an afternoon stroll.

From his point of observation, Perun could tell he was in Small Side. An upscale part from what he could see. A few of the old, well-maintained buildings looked familiar. A shop selling cheese and milk looked very familiar, and he was sure he'd been in the bakery on the corner, with its door propped open and the smell of bread and rolls flowing out, on more than one chilly morning. The more he saw of the streets he was barrelling down, the more he felt he knew this place.

Turn around, he urged his former self. Show me the house where she lives.

He didn't, of course, and Perun once again felt the helplessness of his position. His former self raced on, turning right and then right again once he reached the embankment of the river, his mind so locked on his destination that no other thought passed through it. The scenery was a blur of colour and sound on the periphery, and all sense of time seemed to have left him. His mind was a repeating wheel of what he would do, who would bleed, when he got to the theatre. Just the word was enough to bring back another chunk of memory.

Theatre. He had owned a theatre. One with a stage and with thick, red curtains and footlights that he'd only recently changed over from lantern to electric. One that offered a constantly changing show every fortnight to draw in the crowds not once, but twice a month. One with posters slathered onto every Litfass pillar and fence in town and that sandwich board men advertised on all the major thoroughfares. And one where someone was going to be in a lot of pain very, very soon if he had any say about it.

The theatre he remembered was on the other side of the river. His side. He crossed over one of the wide stone bridges spanning the Vltava, horse carriages and a few rickety motor wagons passing him by, clanking and spewing acrid fumes. For a moment, he regretted not having doubled back to drive his own, but just as soon the thought was forgotten in a haze of determination and anger.

The streets he recognised now. This was a part of New Town he didn't have much reason to venture into. One he'd rather overlooked as not being nearly as profitable. Sure, didn't he have a club and a few legal bars somewhere in these streets? That's right. A few loud, dank beer rooms more for sitting and drowning your sorrows in than entertainment. He didn't oversee their management himself as they were nothing big, just a light smattering of the lightning bolt to make it clear who was in charge, even this far south.

But a stage theatre wasn't one of his holdings. Not here, not anywhere. Why didn't he have the theatre anymore? Cinemas were better, of course, more modern and far more high-profile, but there was still money to be made on music acts, classic dramas and comedy shows with dancing dogs.

What had gone wrong that he'd sold it? Or had he even sold it?

The façade of the theatre told him nothing. Bright red double doors with brass handles and large windows through which a lobby could be seen. He barely had time to take in the posters and the current play bill before he darted down an alleyway, coming out in a cobbled courtyard where he headed for a green door with a sign that read "Artist's Entrance" over the top. He took the four steps two at a time, jerked open the door, and thrust himself into the muted hush inside.

The smells of dust, metal polish, old cigar smoke and paper, so much paper, flooded his senses and Perun felt his head swirl as memories came back like lazy bees stirred up from a honeysuckle hedge, humming and stinging their way past him.

After a few seconds, the name of the place emerged out of the shadowy recesses between the leaves: Theatre Moonlight!!

The Moonlight!

Distantly, Perun could feel his face stretching into a grin and a strange aching thrumming the muscles in his chest. He remembered now!

He had loved this place. More than loved! He had adored and worshipped it. It had been his home away from home. His pride and joy. The Moonlight Theatre and himself had been one and the same thing. This is where Perun Hammerfist had started.

The memories, now freed from their mental captivity, began flowing up into his conscious mind unhindered, bringing with them not only details, but emotions that were as new and exhilarating as they were familiar. It was like pulling on a once favourite coat that had been forgotten in the back of a wardrobe for many seasons, only to realise how much one had missed wearing it.

Perun mentally pulled that coat on and hugged it to himself, savouring the smells of the first place he had truly called his own. When had he acquired it? 1890? 1887? Sometime around then.

It has been his palace, that was right, his palace, and he'd spent every spare moment away from the family business in this hushed, velvet atmosphere, making improvements, auditioning the acts wanting space on his bill, chatting with the artists and employees over coffee, and playing the harried, generous, famous impresario. He'd even worn a monocle for a while, hadn't he? A monocle and. . . a red velvet suit. Yes, that was what he'd been wearing when—

Perun's thoughts slid to a stop and the grin vanished from his face.

Family business. Family, as in Veleček family business?

We have to work together if both of our operations are to survive.

Perun grabbed a hold of the faint memory like the frayed end of a rope leading through a labyrinth. He barely paid attention as his then-self stormed up staircases, opened and slammed shut doors, kicked boxes out of the way. He knew he was looking for someone specific, but all of his mental energy was turned inward, clawing up any fragment of information he must now have access to.

What was this really all about? What was their operation and where was their turf exactly?

Find Veleček, he urged himself. He's got everything to do with this. Remember! Come on!

Perun scratched away at his memory until a faint vision blossomed, too far away to be seen in its entirety, but still clear enough.

A stone house, three-stories, long and plastered a light rose colour. A wall of tan stone higher than a man ran around an open courtyard and on the other side, the long arms of trees spread out like protecting soldiers, forming a dense, green forest. A tall, brick dovecote and smaller, wooden structures Perun knew were for the keeping of bees were set somewhat away from the house. The carcasses of animals, deer by the looks of them, were hanging upside down from wooden frames set against the walls. The country estate of a well-off family.

It seeped into Perun's consciousness that he was seeing his home. This house and grounds was where he'd been born and grew up. This was the place everything started. This and the theatre were the beginnings.

Where is Veleček in this? he asked himself. Show me. You have to know!

But the vision was static, revealing nothing more than a still photograph would. He couldn't make it move like the memory of 1902 he was in, a fully rounded out reality. He wanted to pound his fists on something in frustration at only being able to see what was in front of him and not what he wanted to see. He was used to getting his way and his theatre, as much as he'd loved it and loved seeing it again, wasn't going to tell him very much of importance. Business was where the real information was, and this had been his. . .what? . . .playground?

"Where's Jaromir?" his former-self bellowed, knocking the image of the forest and the manor home out of his mind, dropping Perun out of his thoughts and roughly back into where he was.

A young woman, no more than twenty-five, with a handful of costumes on hangers over her arm, mouthed an inaudible answer as she pressed her back against the wall of the corridor. Perun had the vague feeling he'd slept with her at some point. He was fairly sure he'd never yelled quite like that at her before.

"What?" he thundered, and the woman edged away from him slightly.

"Try the booking office," she whispered.

Perun left her standing like a wet dog in the rain. He stalked to the stairwell at the end of the corridor and bounded up two flights of stairs, coming out in another corridor wallpapered with colourful former Theatre Moonlight advertising posters. Shoving open a door on the right, two men who had been chatting jumped slightly and froze with their faces turned towards him, mouths still open. The one seated at the desk he paid no mind to, it was the other one, a tall man in a shabby jacket who was standing, that was his target. The door crashed into the wall with a loud shiver and he lunged.

The man in the shabby jacket hit the back wall of the office with a cry. Perun slugged him a few times in the stomach, causing the man to double-over. Then jerked him upright by the neck, slamming his head against the wall. With his free hand, Perun fished the tin box from his pocket and held it up where the man could see it.

"Look what I just found, Jaromir" he growled, his face contorted. He could feel the burning flush on his face. "You were supposed to figure out how this is getting into my theatre and stop it."

"I...I..." Jaromir tried to speak, but Perun squeezed his neck harder, cutting off his air supply until he was only making gurgling noises and pulling at Perun's hands in a weak attempt to free himself. He was a lanky, pale man. No match for the Hammerfist.

Out of the corner of his eye, Perun could see the other man racing out the room, grabbing the door and shutting it behind himself as he fled. Good, fewer witnesses.

Without warning, Perun let go of his victim and stepped back a pace, pocketing the tin box.

"Who's distributing the heroin? And don't lie to me. If you think I'm angry now, wait until I find out who you've been protecting."

"I don't know who it is!" Jaromir gasped, rubbing at this throat. "I'm not protecting anyone. I...I've checked everywhere. The coat rooms. The. . .the personal cabinets. The dressing rooms. Nothing. I haven't found the slightest bit of evidence of how anybody here could be selling the stuff."

"Why don't I believe that? You're the backstage manager, you see everything. You know everything." Perun stepped forward and slapped Jaromir hard across the face, but he persisted in his ignorance.

"I don't know. I really don't know! I'm telling the truth. There's no way she could be getting it from anyone here! She must have a source elsewhere. I have no idea. Somewhere else, please!"

"For example?" Perun's anger had congealed and was now a hot billowing cloud of steam. The flames had gone out, settling down into the coals, but they could erupt again at the slightest stir.

Jaromir's gaze jerked and darted up the walls of the office, looking for an answer. Or merely looking for a way to escape another short, sharp beating. "There is someone who might know of a possible –"

"Who?"

"Tomaš."

"Tomaš. Half of the men in Prague are called that. Be more specific."

"The box office attendant. Young kid, on the short side, light hair. He might know of . . . perhaps a guest. I'm not sure. I don't know anything, I swear."

From his point of observation, Perun believed the man. He'd seen enough blameless and clueless men put under pressure to recognise the signs of genuine ignorance, but his former self didn't. He clearly hadn't developed the knack yet.

"If this is a trick to-"

"No trick! He, he knows people, you know? People who know people."

"He knows people who know people."

Jaromir nodded as if his head was attached to a string being jerked up and down. "He may have recognised someone who, who sells the stuff."

"Why haven't you questioned this Tomaš yourself? Wrung answers out of him already? Or is this is less important than standing around chatting and scratching your balls, you lazy. . .?"

Jaromir looked as if he was going to be sick. "I. . .I didn't want to start rumours. He's got a big mouth, you know? He might start telling people that I. . .that. . .the drugs. . ."

Perun contemplated the backstage manager with a unbelieving glare for a few moments before he said in a very calm, very polite voice, "If you're lying, you'll regret you were ever born. I'll see to that." Then he turned on his heel and left the office. He couldn't prove anything that way and there was a limit to how far he could go with certain people. Perun was glad that he at least had known that at the time.

In the empty corridor, he could hear the sounds of a typewriter clanging and an electric music machine churning out tinny songs from a room further on. He pulled out his watch from his waistcoat pocket and snapped open the lid. The interior lit up, glowing a soft purple, and the golden numerals on the metal wheels inside showed it to be almost four in the afternoon. The box office opened at seven. He snapped the watch shut, placed it back in his pocket and then strode towards the stairwell.

Just before the first step, he hesitated, and slowly turned his head to the left to frown at one of the posters that papered the walls. The poster was larger than the rest. An oval, sepia photograph in the centre showed Libuše dressed in some sort of ridiculous, ancient-looking finery, looking purposefully to the side at something the viewer couldn't see.

Libuše, the woman he was so in love with, it was souring into hate. The woman who was laying at that very moment asleep in a drug-induced haze in an apartment he'd financed.

The observing Perun recognised what he was seeing after a few short moments, and part of the puzzle clicked into place, sending what felt like slivers of ice through his blood stream. The adventure under the river. This trip back into his own memory. Veleček's worried face and refusal to tell him much of anything. It all lined up.

PRINCESS LIBUŠE as Ludmila in P.Černý's The Stones of Vyšehrad! The words across the bottom proclaimed in large, stylised green-and-gold lettering.

Princess Libuše. An actress. Of course. The royal title was a mere stage name. His guess had been right and now he felt as if he'd been kicked in chest.

You're starting to remember and remembering is painful. This is so you can tell the two apart.

Old Veleček had known about both of them all along, the one under the water and the one in Perun's arms. He'd made sure Perun understood the difference. Seen it with his own eyes. His Libuše was. . . nothing more than an entertainer. A pretender. A fraud in a glittery costume stealing the legend of another and crowning herself queen. And worst of all, he knew she probably wasn't going to live very much longer and her death would tear him to pieces.

But there was more. He was almost certain he'd bestowed that name on her himself. He'd created Princess Libuše. He'd done it. He'd wanted only the best for her. And for himself. It was him who had wanted a diamond to show off in his dream world of Moonlight. No matter if it revealed itself to be mere pasteboard in the light of day.

Perun could distantly feel the sides of the time machine again and knew he was hitting his arms against the padding.

Something deep inside him was beginning to break open, agonizingly cracking at the seams and bashing out all the screws and pins that had kept him together.

She wanted to be a star, he murmured to himself. She'd asked me to make her a star and I made her into one. Is that what killed her?

He thought he knew what was coming and he didn't want to have to live through it again. It was too painful. Libuše was going to die and he was going to go off the deep end – if he hadn't been there all this time already.

For the first time, Perun wondered if he was insane. If he'd only imagined his life as a gangster. The lightning bolt a mere figment of his unstable, grief-and-guilt stricken mind. Was he, or wasn't he, who he thought he was?

Distantly, Perun smelled the scent of lilacs and felt the tension being eased out of his body.

Easy, lad. Just go along with it, a voice whispered. Dima. That had to be Dima. The gravedigger was communicating with him.

I want out. Perun shouted in his mind. Tell Veleček I've seen enough, I get it now. Let me out.

There's more. You've only seen the surface.

Perun gritted his teeth. In 1902, he glowered at the image of his imaginary princess, cursing her silently before he said "Never again, my darling. Never, ever again."

And then fled down the staircase.