“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

At mid-afternoon yesterday I lay down for a nap on the waterbed, so I could be close to Jane, who sat at the card table. She’d been having a rough time and I didn’t want to leave her alone. I fell into a deep sleep after setting the alarm for an hour. I woke up hearing her voice as she called out to someone who was evidently at the back screen door, which I’d locked as usual. I thought the visitor would be a neighbor. My eyes barely open, I stumbled out onto the back porch. As soon as I opened the kitchen door I saw I was wrong.

“Oh, I mean you no harm,” he said. “Fred doesn’t. But he’s awfully cold....” When I asked him again what he would do if he didn’t get into our place, he said, “Why, I think Fred will die. It doesn’t matter. He’ll just die. I am Seth; I know he’ll be all right.” And with that Fred sat down in the wood chips beside the stump that Frank Longwell had placed for us when he’d built the back porch for us. Fred did this very calmly.

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.

I was just going back in after the hot drink when the dark-colored police car pulled up Holley Road and turned into the driveway. I waved to the officer driving. He was a youngish man with a mustache. He came inside the porch and I began to explain the situation to him as briefly as I could. “How did you get here?” he asked Fred. “I walked,” Fred answered. “Fred has read some of our books,” I said. “This is difficult to explain briefly, but he came here from Denver, he said, and he has no money, and nowhere to go when he leaves here. He’s given us those books and manuscripts” —I pointed to them, stacked up on the picnic table—“and he wants my wife to read them. I don’t have his address—”