Seth Garin

Seth Garin is a fictional character from the Richard Bachman novel The Regulators.
Seth is one of only a very few central characters from The Regulators who doesn't appear in Desperation, a related novel.
Seth's soma (the combination of his physical body and internal spirit) is frail and autistic, and indeed cannot even form coherent words most of the time -but Seth's pneuma (his projection of himself on the Astral Plane) is a brilliant boy who possesses above average intelligence even by genius standards.
Powers and abilities
Seth Garin, bereft of Tak's influence, was an apparent telepathic sender and receiver -telepathic 'sender' in the sense that his family members could feel his presence within a range of several yards, and which Tak itself sensed from miles away (as the family drove towards home on a miles-distant highway that passed near Desperation, Nevada). Seth was able to 'receive' Tak's entreaties even from that distance; Tak had promised the boy the ability to make his cowboys-and-Indians fantasies come true, and Seth eventually got to within close enough range (in the Rattlesnake No. 1 Shaft, the same location that Tak was imprisoned in the pages of Desperation), for Tak to infect and become part of Seth. Seth was also a psychic empath; he used that ability to psychically induce inner peace to other human beings around him, particularly his foster parents, to ease their pain as best he could while the family was under Tak's dominion; Audrey Wyler wrote in her journal that the feeling that Seth transmitted to her (after one particularly brutal session with Tak in which he made her hit her head on a wall over and over and over again) was that of utter peace and serenity.
The gestalt of Seth Garin and Tak is a psychic vampire, which "feeds" on the psychic energies of sentient beings, not to sate its appetite (Tak itself displayed no apparent need for nourishment of any kind), but to effect a variety of other powers. Tak can feed slowly on a victim at close range -as it first did with the members of Seth's biological family, and later, husband Herb (psychically draining him over an extended period of time and then sending him off with a telepathic command to kill himself once he was psychically drained); as Tak-Seth's powers grow, it can feed much more quickly, as it demonstrates with an unnamed homeless person and with Peter Jackson.
Its preferred method of feeding is to syphon the sudden release of psychic energy that happens to its victims at death, whether those deaths are directly or indirectly caused by him/it.
Fueled by siphoned-off psychic energy, Tak-Seth displays a vast range of powers.
Tak-Seth is able to read minds at close range, and can sense the relative location of other humans at a much further radius.
Tak-Seth is able to override the motor functions of humans within a close range, and implant powerful subliminal suggestions to human beings at an even greater range; it is Tak who pushes Jim Reed over the edge after the teenager accidentally shoots and kills Collie Entragian. Psychically goaded by Tak in this manner, the teenaged boy then kills himself.
Moreover, Tak-Seth is able to bend reality itself to its will; it successfully transforms Poplar Street into a mixture of the TV show Bonanza, a classic Western movie called The Regulators, and a fictional cartoon (i.e., within the book The Regulators itself) called Motokops 2200, warped by the perceptions of a child's view of reality and Tak's appetite for chaos and destruction. The houses and buildings of Poplar Street change into cartoony versions of the Wild West, the created animals and plants are malformed, deadly versions of a child's drawings, and the toys of the Motokops cartoon series, as well as several characters from the aforementioned Westerns, become the Regulators, hellish beings bent on the eventual deaths of every remaining member of Poplar Street.
The street is somehow placed into a pocket dimension; at one point some of the characters attempt to escape Poplar Street via one of the back alleys only to find that all of the roads and paths off Poplar Street lead, figuratively, to nowhere -outside of Poplar Street is only a child's idea of what a vast cowboy movie desert would be.
The Defeat of Tak
Tak is outsmarted by the brilliant mind of Seth Garin himself; his physical body is autistic but his spirit on the Astral Plane is possessed of an above-average intellect even by genius standards.
Seth's plan is multi-fold:
First, he subtly influences and distracts Tak over time, "whispering" to Tak so subtly that Tak believes Seth's suggestions to be his own inner thoughts.
Second, he allows Tak to read some of his thoughts when he is speaking telepathically (and physically) with his aunt Audrey; this leads Tak to believe that he can read all of Seth's thoughts whenever he wishes.
Third, Seth engages in brief and infrequent psychic displays of resistance to Tak's power (such as the various times Tak-Seth wants to physically experience and engage in sex with his own Aunt); this leads Tak to not only believe that he is stronger than the boy is on the Astral Plane (which is true), but also that Seth has a very limited range of control over Tak's powers (which proves to be untrue).
Fourth, he is able to psychically create a retreat for Audrey Wyler within her own mind; her ability to mentally sequester herself there prevents Tak-Seth from siphoning psychic energy from her as it did with her husband Herb.
Finally, when the time is right, he tricks both Tak and his aunt Audrey and successfully executes his master plan; he tricks his Aunt Audrey into believing that he is going to help her escape with him (he alone knows that Tak's ability to track him down and find him is beyond Audrey's ability to physically escape), while simultaneously, temporararily fashioning a psychic barrier to block Tak from re-entering Seth's body. (Tak hates to stay in Seth's body whenever the boy has to defecate; Seth asks Aunt Audrey in advance to spike his chocolate milk with laxatives). While Tak is expending energy to re-enter Seth, the child (in his Aunt's arms) sends a murderous impulse to one of the survivors, Cammie Reed; she shoots Audrey and Seth, killing their physical bodies.
At the end of the novel, the reader is informed that Seth, apparently and secretly able to use Tak's abilities at least as well as Tak itself could all along, uses Tak's energies to punch a hole through dimensions, through which he transports both his and Audrey's astral essences at the moments of their deaths. These two essences emerge in the real world (i.e., the real world in which the reader lives and the real Stephen King writes novels) as a pair of near-corporeal spirits that are occasionally glimpsed at a romantic retreat.
According to the various witnesses over the years who glimpse them, the woman is an eternally young, attractive woman in her early to mid-30s, and the boy is an eternally young child of six or seven years old who bears a striking, familial resemblance to the woman and is always seen wearing cowboy boots.
Moreover, according to the psychic emanations that everyone feels when in the meadow in which the ghosts 'live' ...they are both eternally happy.

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