“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“You walked?” I was incredulous. That would be fifteen miles or so. In this weather, without a coat? I wasn’t thinking too clearly yet, but that would be feat par excellence for anyone—let alone lugging two bags along. From the attaché case Fred took the handwritten manuscript of The Rules of Love. “Please. I am Seth. Show this book to Jane and have her read it while I wait here, then you tell me, Robert, what she thinks of it....” This, after Fred comprehended that I had no intention of letting him in the house. Jane could not deal with him, I thought, although he showed no signs of violence. “Please, Fred is getting cold.... If you won’t take the whole manuscript, take just this one chapter—Fifteen—and show that to her. Let her read it. Then you come out and tell Fred what Jane thinks of it. I can help her. She’s going to die soon.”

“If you don’t let me in your house I’ll just die,” Fred said. By now he’d taken two hardcover books from a bag, and given them to me. One by Jerszy Kosinski and one by Somerset Maugham. The latter was an expensive anthology. In one he’d written a note on a blank page to Jane, and to me in the other. Check their phrasing for a close approximation of the way he talked. Fred also handed me a thick, neatly tied package of brown paper and yellow string—The Christ Book, he said, which was for Jane and me, and for Prentice-Hall. I didn’t open it, and still haven’t. When I asked him where he was really from, he said Denver, and that his address was inside the package. It wasn’t on the other manuscript. Nor was I quick-witted enough to ask if he had a family, if anyone knew where he was, or what he did for a living—if he worked, or could—or how he found our house in the first place. I wondered if he was schizophrenic. He appeared to be harmless enough.

The water wasn’t hot yet. When I looked out on the back porch Fred was gone. The door was half open. I had instant visions of him wandering away, not really meaning to, but perhaps getting lost—and wearing my best coat. His bags sat there on the ramp Frank Longwell had made for Jane’s chair. A moment later Fred came back into view from in back of the garage. “I had to go to the bathroom,” he said, tightening the coat around him. He didn’t seem to be so cold now. I told him I’d called the police, and he nodded. “Fred means you and your wife no harm at all,” he said, speaking for Seth again. I told him I knew that. I still wanted to know what he was going to do when he’d left here.