High Beams

High Beams is a scary story about a young woman who goes out for drinks with her friends one night and decides to drive home on her own. A version of this story appeared in the book, “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark”.

As the woman drove down a deserted highway, she noticed a lone pair of headlights quickly approaching her car from behind. When the car came closer she noticed that it was going to overtake her.

The car drew up beside her, but then the driver suddenly swerved back behind her car. She started getting nervous and kept an eye on the strange car in her rear view mirror.

He pulled up dangerously close to her rear bumper and began flashing his high beams at her. The headlights dimmed for a moment, but then the high beams flashed again and the car behind her surged forward. The car followed her, very closely, and on tight curves, or over hills, he would flash his high beams on and off.

The frightened woman struggled to keep her eyes on the road and fought the urge to keep looking at the car behind her. Finally, she approached her exit but the car continued to follow, flashing the high beams again and again.

The terrified woman took out her mobile phone and dialled 911. When the operator answered, the woman screamed into the phone “A car is following me! He keeps tailgating, and blinking his lights at me!”

The woman gave her address, and in a few minutes she saw the red and blue lights of a police car in the distance. She breathed a sigh of relief as she pulled into her driveway, but suddenly the strange car pulled into the driveway behind her and began blinking its lights on and off like a maniac.

The police car screeched to a halt on the woman’s front lawn, and two police officers jumped out with their guns drawn. They pulled the man out of the strange car and forced him to lie face down on the lawn. Then they handcuffed him as he screamed, “There’s someone in her car! There’s someone in her car!”

The two policemen suddenly pointed their guns in the woman’s direction and fired. The woman screamed, but when she turned around, she saw the bloody corpse of a murderer fall out of her back seat. There was a large butcher knife still clasped in his cold, dead hand. The police searched her back seat and found duct tape, a blindfold, and a pair of handcuffs lying there.

The woman realized that the man in the strange car had been trying to save her. When the police released him, he explained that, as he pulled up behind her car and his headlights lit up her back seat, he had seen a man with a butcher knife rising up behind her. Just as the madman was about to stab her, he flashed his high beams and the figure crouched back down.

“I flashed my high beams every time I saw him raise the knife!” he said.