Heavy Metal Magazine #6

In the frozen woods of Krolówka, Poland, a group of Soviet and Eastern European apparatchiks gather for a hunting party, their rifles cold and their memories sharper. As they track game through the snow, each man recounts a personal story shaped by the shadow of Vassili Alexandrovitch Tchevtchenko, a figure whose presence looms over their lives like a ghost of the past. The tension between memory and survival grows with every step into the wilderness.

In "null," a lone figure waits at a bus stop—only to reveal himself as a lifeless doll. The driver takes him to a hidden place where countless other dolls of the same figure stand in varying poses, each a silent echo of the same form. Placing one in a seated position on the bus, the story lingers on the quiet, eerie ritual of replication and placement, leaving the meaning of the act just out of reach.