The Merlin Conspiracy by Diana Wynne Jones

“I—He’s not real. He’s my totem animal.”
    The man looked surprised. “You think she’s what? What gave you that idea?”
    â€œThey told me to go into a light trance and look for my totem in the otherwhere,” I said. “It’s the only explanation.”
    The man gave an impatient sigh. “What nonsense. These Plantagenate mages do irritate me. All their magic is this kind of rule-of-thumb half-truth! You shouldn’t believe a word they say, unless you can get it confirmed by an independent source. Magic is wide, various, and big . If you really think that animal is just a mind product, touch her. Put your hand on her head.”
    When that man told you to do something, you found yourself doing it. Before I could even be nervous, I found myself bending sideways and putting my hand on the panther, on the broad part of her head between her flattened ears. She didn’t like it. She flinched all over, but she let me do it. She was warm and domed there, and her black hair wasn’t soft like a cat’s; it was harsh, with a prickly end to each hair. She was as real as I was. I don’t think I’d ever felt such a fool. The man was looking at me with real contempt, and on top of it all I hadn’t noticed that the panther was a female.
    But perhaps, I thought as I straightened up, I’m not very real here after all, because my body has to be in a trance back at the stadium. Then I thought, I keep having to do what this man tells me. In a minute he’s going to say, Go on, die . And I shall do that wherever I am.
    I said, “So he—she’s not a totem.”
    â€œI didn’t say that,” the man said. “She wouldn’t have come to you if she wasn’t. I simply meant that she’s as much flesh and blood as Slatch is.” He reached out and rubbed the head of the spotted cat. His hand was thin and all sinews, the sort of strong, squarish hand I’d always wished I had, full of power. The cat gazed at me from under it sarcastically. See? it seemed to say.
    I knew it was only seconds before he was going to tell me to die, and I started to play for time like anything. “And this wood,” I said. “Is this wood real, then?”
    His thin black eyebrows went up, irritably. “All the paths and places beyond the worlds have substance,” he said.
    â€œEven …” I made a careful gesture toward the turquoise oval, making it slow in order not to annoy that spotted cat. “Even if you can see that from here? They can’t both be real.”
    â€œWhy not?” he more or less snapped. “You have a very limited notion of what’s real, don’t you? Will it make you any happier to be somewhere you regard as real?”
    â€œI don’t kn—” I began to say. Then I choked it off because we were suddenly back in the concrete passage under the seats of the stadium and a little patter of applause was coming from overhead. I was standing in front of this man and his killer cat, exactly as I had been under the tree, but the black panther wasn’t there. She must be relieved! I thought, and I took a quick look round for my body, which I was sure had to be sitting against the wall in a trance.
    It wasn’t there. I could see the place where it had been by the scuff marks that my heels had made on the floor. But I was the only one of me there. The time seemed to be much later. The light coming in from the grids slanted the other way and looked more golden. I could feel that the patter of clapping was faint and tired overhead, at the end of a long day.
    This is only a dream! I told myself in a panic. Someone can’t have made off with my body! Can they?
    â€œYou were in the wood in your body, too,” the man told me, as if I was almost too stupid for him to bother with. In here he seemed even more powerful. He wasn’t much taller than me, and a lot skinnier, but he was like a