“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I stared at him. He meant it.
I knew him well enough to know.
I said as defiantly as I could, “It’s only a game.
Besides, we don’t know any Seth.”

Then my visitor sat with my husband,
And smiled out through my eyes at the cat.
With me out of the way, he seemed quite at home.
“Good evening. I’m Seth,” my lips spoke.
He began walking my body about
As if getting accustomed to arms and legs.
I’d never been so astonished,
To be locked out of myself like that.

But he was benign and jovial as a bishop
Someone might ask in for an evening of tea,
And when he let me peek out through his eyes,
The familiar living room seemed very strange.

Now as seasons come and go,
He visits twice a week,
From worlds that have no wind or snow,
But still have promises to keep.

Actually, the board first gave a few messages from a personality called Frank Withers, who insisted that he had known our neighbor, Miss Cunningham. I didn’t take this very seriously at first, but he also said that he knew an elderly woman who worked with me at the local art gallery where I had a part-time job. When questioned, this woman told me that she had known such a man, though he had merely been an acquaintance.

“Let me read you some of the material you just dictated,” Rob said, and he read several pages. (Only a few excerpts were given here.)

When he said things like that, I’d get upset, and the familiar living room seemed strange. The table, chairs, the couch and rug looked satisfyingly normal in the warm lamplight. Yet I felt these shapes were highly significant, only intrusions of other realities that were invisible but always active.

I paused. Rob waited for a few moments, wondering whether or not to interrupt me. Finally, he asked quietly, “Where did she live?”

“How long did she live?” he asked.

I paused again. Then I saw the whole thing very clearly, and I said, excited: “She died, at seventeen, there in the cobbler’s shop. She died from burns. The cobbler came out of the back room, and there she was, all in flames and screaming. He shoved her out into the street and rolled her over and over on the stones and in the dirt; but she died.

“She … she lived three doors down the street, in a dark front room. She had two brothers, one off someplace; he was a sailor. The other was younger. Sarah’s father did something for the cobbler, and, in return, he made shoes for the younger brother, and Sarah was in the shop to get them.”

I kept seeing more. I would think that I was telling Rob about each scene as I saw it, but then he would ask a question, and I’d realize that I hadn’t said a word for some time.

“What crops did they grow?” he asked, and I tried to rouse myself enough to keep on speaking while still retaining focus on these strange shifting scenes.

“The cobbler was an old man. He was also the sexton of a small church, the Church of England. He used to ring the bells. His wife was fifty-three, Anna. She wore glasses and had grayish white hair and was very stout and messy.

“There was a boy in the shop, too — not their son, an apprentice to the cobbler. He slept in the kitchen. His name was Albert Lang. He was eleven, I think. The cobbler and his wife had no children. She had trouble with her glasses … most people didn’t wear any. They were handmade; they had to grind the glass. They were like magnifying glasses, in a frame on her nose …

“The cobbler was comparatively well off, though not wealthy. He was fifty-three when he died. The boy, Albert, was too young to take over the shop, and for a couple of years the village had no cobbler, and the boy was a fisherman. Then another cobbler came and Albert helped out in the shop again … He finally married. His wife’s name was also Sarah. She was a cousin of Sarah Wellington’s. Most of the people in the village were related in one way or another; they had no other place to go.”

“The people didn’t go to London often. Some never went at all. The first Sarah, who died at seventeen, never went. Albert’s Sarah went. King Edward was in London then. Albert and Sarah did well and could afford to go. When Edward was crowned, they made the trip. They didn’t see the coronation. She was forty-one and he was forty-six at the time. They had two or three children. I don’t know what happened to them.

“Albert liked to hunt, but he couldn’t get much because the ground was too rocky … deer and rabbits, a special kind of rabbit, no big tails, gray hares of some kind. And there were gray squirrels.”

I was quiet again. Rob didn’t know exactly what to do, so he just asked the first question that came into his head. “Were the people happy?”

I stopped. Suddenly all of it was gone. I told Rob, and he switched the lights on.

“Well. I saw the … feet of a man. He was walking along a flat, dusty, reddish road. I think he was barefoot, though now I wonder about some kind of rudimentary sandal. He had a brownish, long robe flapping about the calves of his legs. The legs were thin.”

“I’ll ask Seth,” Rob said, smiling. “Or maybe he wasn’t anyone.”

Rob began to laugh. “That’s part of the fun of it,” he said. “Finding out.”