The Black Cat IF Outline

X1. Writing before my execution

2. Gentle personality and love for animals

3. Marriage and pets

4. Description of Pluto, wife's superstition 

5. My care for P.

6. Personality change from alcohol addiction, abuse of wife, pets,
   and finally P.

7. I gouge out P's eye

8. Feeling of horror but feeble remorse

9. I hang and kill P. out of a spirit of perverseness

10. Destructuion of wealth in house fire

11. Discovery of figure of cat imprinted on last standing wall

12. Natural explanation of cat figure

13. Half-sentiment of pseudo-remorse, seek to replace cat

14. Black Cat with White Splotch (BCWS) appears in tavern

15. BCWS follows me home and settles in

16. I come to dislike BCWS

17. Discover BCWS is missing eye like P.

18. BCWS affection for me increases with my dislike of it

19. My dread of BCWS; BCWS splotch resolves to shape of gallows

20. I can no longer rest because of BCWS's constant presence

21. I abandon myself to evil thoughts, abuse wife

22. BCWS almost trips me on cellar stairs; in rage I attempt to kill
    it with axe; wife intervenes; I kill wife

23. I decide to conceal the body inside cellar wall

24. Conceal body in hollow in wall and replaster

25. I look for BCWS to kill it, but am unable to find it; feeling of
    relief

26. Happiness at BCWS's departure greater than guilt for wife's murder

27. Police search cellar but find nothing

28. As police are about to leave, I comment on the walls' solid
    construction and tap the spot where body is concealed

29. Tap answered by cry from behind wall

30. Police open the hole in the wall, revealing wife's corpse and
    BCWS still alive after being walled up with the corpse.