The Black Cat is the story of a married man who has a love for animals that grows as he himself grows older. This man ends up getting pets of all kinds and developing relationships with them but his closest relationship is with a totally black cat by the name of Pluto. Pluto and he are inseparable in the beginning. Pluto follows him mostly everywhere he goes and their bond becomes tighter than ever.
The man soon starts to develop an addiction to alcohol which throws off his relationship with his wife and the pets he has acquired through his prior love for them. The alcohol brings out an angry side of him that his wife has never seen and he starts to abuse her and his pets with most of the focus on his best friend Pluto. He now sees Pluto as a "beast" that he despises and one night lashes out at the poor cat and tears out one of its eyes. Pluto, losing the connection he once had with his master avoids the man at all cost, so when the man once again grabs ahold of him, retaliates and injures the mans hand with a deep bite and gash from its claws. The man in a drunken stuper, ties a noose and hangs the cat from his neck, killing him.
The man later awakens from his drunken stuper to find that his house has caught on fire and he and his wife barely escape with their lives. When the flames disperse, the man walks though the ashes that were once his home and finds Pluto burnt to a crisp against the only wall that now stands in the center of the charred home.
The man and his wife are forced to move into the cellar of an abandoned home for all their wealth and possessions are lost in the fire. It is there that the man soon befriends another cat, much like Pluto, having only one eye and all black except for a white patch of hair that grows on the felines chest. For his feeling of guilt, he allows the cat to stay in the cellar with them but soon, his alcoholic mind soon takes over again and he feels the same hatred towards this "beast" as he did with Pluto. He picks up an axe and tries to end the cat’s life, but his wife stops him mid-swing. This angers him so much, that he turns the axe on her and buries the axe deep into her skull.
After realizing the enormous mistake he has made and not wanting to be arrested for her murder, he buries his wife’s body in a broken wall in the cellar. He patches up the hole perfectly and finds joy in that he has covered up his murder and also that he has not seen the wretched beast since doing so.
Police who later come investigating the disappearance of his wife are led to the wall in which he buried his wife from the sounds of a loud and terrible whaling that is taking place behind it. The police knock down the wall and discover his wife’s body laying there with the cat, the man accidentally buried with her, standing beside her. The man is then taken into custody and the story ends.
