The story opens on a the narrator as a condemned man, as he recounts his tale from the beginning. He was a man who loved animals more then anything and so when he married a young woman, he made sure to have lots of pets. He admits to being violent and an alcoholic but he always made sure not to abuse his beloved cat Pluto.
One night in a drunken rampage, the narrator feels that the cat is ignoring him, and so out of anger he takes the cat and cuts out his eye. The man feels remorseful for this in the moment but gets over it quickly. Pluto starts to avoid the narrator to his dismay.
The narrator becomes angry with Pluto for avoiding him, and so he decides to hand him in a tree. Later that night his house mysteriously burns down, and later as he searches through the ruins of his house, the narrator finds an image of a cat with a rope around his neck. Shaken by this incident, the narrator goes out to find a new cat, and one finds him with a white spot on his belly and an eye missing just like Pluto at a tavern.
The cat loves the narrator, but the narrator can only think of Pluto when he sees his new can, and grows a resentment for it. One day the cat trips the narrator down the stairs. The narrator tries to kill it with an axe but his wife stops him. Enraged, the narrator kills his wife with the axe.
Later that night, the narrator hides his wife's body in the walls of the cellar, and the cat seems to have run off. A few days later the police show up to investigate his house. The narrator lets them because he is fully confident that the police won't find his wife's body.
As the police are about to leave his house, he brings them to the cellar. he boasts about the masonry of his cellar as he taps a wall. Then a screeching is heard and so the police tear down the wall. Behind it they find the wife's dead body and the cat that the narrator thought had ran away, who had accidentally been walled up with her.