I've started reading a book called Drinking Midnight Wine, which has the magical world in parallel theme going (I'm still not that far into it) but here's a descriptive piece from it.
Stretched out before him lay the sleeping town, still and quiet now, just an army of street lights pushing back the darkness. There was the tower and spire of Trinity Church, and beyond it row upon row of terraced houses and cottages, ascending the steep hills that enclosed the town - ordinary people sleeping in their ordinary town, all's quiet, all's well. But that was just in Veritie.
In the magical world, every bit as clear to Jimmy Thunder's semi-divine eyes, the town was never quiet. Bradford-on-Avon was an old, old locality, littered with all the remnants of the past. The very old creature that lived Under the Hill stirred restlessly, as though it could feel the thunder god's gaze, and deeper still, things and shapes and presences out of times past slept and dreamed down among the bones of the town. On the last day, when the earth gives up its dead for judgement, many of those buried in Bradford-on-Avon's cemeteries will be surprised to find out who some of their neighbours have been.
Old buildings flickered in and out of sight, ghosts of the town that was. Pale figures sat glumly at the base of the old gallows in the Bull Pit, swapping hard-luck stories and old, old claims of innocence, while in the park next to Westbury House, old soldiers guarded the war memorial, and made rude comments about the new pale green Millennium Statue in the gardens opposite. From the River Avon came undine songs of unbearable melancholy, sometimes drowned out by the terrible cry of the Howling Thing, still imprisoned in the Chapel on the Bridge. Powers and Dominations sat at feast in the ghostly remembrance of what had once been a seventeenth-century eating place, The Three Gables, sharing secrets in loud, carrying voices and deciding men's fates with a laugh and a shrug and a careless quip. King Mob still held sway in the town centre, as men and women long dead rioted over the changing fortunes of the cloth trade. And all across the town there were flaring lights and voices in the earth, and unnatural creatures flying on the night winds.
Business as usual, in Bradford-on-Avon, in Mysterie.
I'm not thinking of quite that level of goings on, but the odd magical spot or two existing amongst the mundane world would work well, I think. What do you reckon?
