“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I packed my suitcase and art materials the day before I was to leave Sayre. At suppertime that night I received a telephone call from Ed Robbins, an old friend I’d gone to art school with in Brooklyn, New York before World War II. The results flowing from that call, which was so of-the-moment, were to change my life forever—and Jane’s too! Ed offered me a job as an artist in his upstate hometown of Schuylerville, some 11 miles east of Saratoga Springs and on the Hudson River. He was writing and drawing the Mike Hammer daily and Sunday comic strips for his friend, Mickey Spillane, and was having trouble meeting those remorseless weekly deadlines for the syndicate that distributed the feature to newspapers coast to coast. Ed knew I’d done comic-book work: would I be interested in helping him get his strips to the syndicate on time? The pay would be good. I could live with him and his wife Ella and their children until I found a place for myself if our arrangement worked out.

Well, the pay wouldn’t be as good as I could earn in New York City, I explained to my parents, but my living expenses would be much lower. Besides, I’d be close enough to visit them often, so what could I lose? I could always go to the city. What I didn’t understand until later was that Ed’s seemingly innocent call had set into motion a series of events that one by one would magically fall into place and create a much larger, much longer and more penetrating overall experience. I wasn’t used to consciously thinking in such terms.

Actually, Laurel and I drive past 458 often, without paying much attention to it on our way from Sayre to the hill house. But now we were there on its grounds, focusing upon that precious symbol where Jane and I had lived for 15 years. I hadn’t set foot in 458 since the day we’d moved to the hill house 27 years ago. Incredible! Already, as I pushed open the heavy front door for the six of us, I felt like an intruder, that my footsteps were stirring up the past. We tramped noisily up the narrow and turning stairs to face a fire door guarding the second floor. Past that, we were in the narrow hall that led to a similar door guarding a stairwell at the back of the building. The hall was much shorter and gloomier than I remembered it to be. The sounds of our voices were crowded; the space we stood in seemed to be so confining, with the doors at each end, that I marveled that my dear wife and I had lived in the house for all that time. Apartments 4 and 5, the ones Jane and I had rented (we could afford only Apartment 5 for the first several years) opened off each side of the hall. Apartment 4 was empty; its door was on a short chain that let me push it open a bit to peek into a now-deserted living room that Jane and I had known so well.