Creepypasta Stories

We Call Her Stitch-Face

By: Hugo Dark

Stitch-face sat three desks in front of me in grade three. We called her that because her upper lip had a hitch on the right side. An animal had bitten her, or that's the story we made up. It's not like she ever told us or said a word to anyone. As the weird kid, she took a lot of crap from everyone. In class she would sit with eyes glued to her notebook, her expression pitifully dark.

To be honest, I didn't enjoy school very much either. Warwick Elementary looked like a castle from the outside. Inside it had the cheery atmosphere of a factory. It was a place where little boys and girls went to have the devil beaten out of them, literally.

Then again, it might not have been so bad if we hadn't been unlucky enough to end up in her class. If anyone deserved to be called a witch it was Ms. Pendleton. How someone who hated children as much as she did ended up teaching is something that I'll never understand.

"You're nothing but a bunch of animals," she'd say. "Animals that can't behave get put in cages. Understand?"

It wasn't just an empty threat. There was a cage at the back of the classroom where we kept the class pet, a little grey rabbit we called Sleepy, since that was all he ever did. Ms. Pendleton would tell us that Sleepy had been a boy once. A naughty boy who'd made her so mad that she'd locked him in that cage forever. Slowly, that boy had forgotten how to walk, how to talk, and eventually, he forgot that he had ever been a human being at all. Eight is old enough to know the difference between reality and fantasy. But coming from her poisonous lips, the threat of joining Sleepy in that cage felt real.

Ms. Pendleton wouldn't get away today with the things she did to us back then. See, she really thought of us as nothing more than chattel. Beside her desk stood the cabinet where she kept her devices. Her "tools" as she called them. Ms. Pendleton had custom fashioned something called the "straight holder." If she caught you leaning forward or to the side she'd smack her ruler on your desk and say "Straighten up." Two times got you a pull on the ear. Three times and you had to spend the rest of the day strapped to an iron crossbar. Another one was called the "head holder." Same idea, except the point was to keep you from turning your head to look out the window while she was talking.

With Stitch-face, her punishments always went even further. She didn't have parents. Alice was an orphan.

A kid without parents seemed categorically impossible to me. I couldn't understand it. At the end of the day, when all of us would wait for our parents to come pick us up, I'd try and stick around to see who came for Alice.

One time I saw her walking hand in hand with a very tall man. The whole figure of him—thin and crooked—seemed to wobble in the air like a dancing shadow. The sight of him made my blood turn cold. His presence just felt... wrong. When he disappeared under a street light I figured it out. Alice wasn't holding hands with a man who looked like a shadow—the thing beside her was her shadow!

Besides the doll she dragged along the pavement, Alice was walking home alone. I could only imagine what home was for her.

That doll lived in Alice's desk, stuffed all the way at the back so you could only see its hands and feet dangling from the drawer. The funny thing about it was that the doll had a messed up lip too. Its scar was in the exact same place as Alice's.

I wonder who got theirs first.

The only time anyone stood up to Ms. Pendleton was when she tried to take Alice's doll away.

"Give it," she said. "A girl your age shouldn't be playing with dolls. It's time to grow up and leave such fiendish ways behind."

Alice didn't say a word. She simply stared up at the teacher. Ms. Pendleton swung the desk around and reached for the doll, only her hand froze in the air before it ever touched the drawer, like it had met an invisible wall.