A man, who is visiting a small town for a few days, sits in a pub playing dominoes as a procession of funeral goers begin to walk by. The bartender, Tom, tells the man that the funeral goers are from a large family called the Sleators who make up a significant portion of the town’s population. Tom says that they will have to do part of the funeral in the back room of the pub and that as they walk through that the man shouldn’t make eye contact with any of them as they may beat others up for doing so. The man listens to the instructions as a trail of people enter the pub. The man does pretty well in not looking at the family, but as he is exiting the bathroom he hears a dispute coming from the room with the Sleators. He stands by the door to listen and hears an older member of the family push a younger member over and tell him that he should know what to do by now. The younger member of the family exits the room and sees the man standing there, but mostly ignores him. As the man returns to the cottage he is staying at, he carries a bag of cat food for a cat named Sanderson that lives in the shed behind his cottage. He finds the cat eating a small white blob and the man throws the blob in the trash after accidentally scaring the car away. He spends the night in the cottage and sees a moving shape, presumably a person, on the other side of the hedges of the cottage. The field on the land next to the cottage belongs to the Sleators and the man worries that the family has maybe come to beat him up after listening in on their funeral. Before he goes to sleep he looks out his bedroom window and sees a figure carrying a coil of rope under the moonlight. The next day he decides to go on a walk around a trail near his cottage. As he is on the path he hears an angry shout and out of fear begins to jog back to his cottage. He arrives at his cottage and sees a child standing near the door who belongs to the Sleator family. The man asks the kid where his parents are but the kid simply responds that he was looking. The man is afraid to return the child to the Sleators because he thinks that they will think he kidnapped the child so he drives the kid to Tom at the pub and asks for help. Tom agrees to drive with him to drop the kid off. They go to the Sleators’ farm and it seems abandoned and broken down. Tom walks around the property as the man and the child stay in the car. The man thinks he sees a white blob in the house, but before he can get a good look Tom comes to the car and gets the child to the Sleator matriarch. The old woman watches as the two drive away and Tom says that a goat had escaped and wreaked havoc. The man returns to his cottage and that night wakes up late and hears something in his house. He jumps up and yells out and then feels that the thing has left. He looks out the window and sees two figures near the cottage walking away from it. The next day he goes to a different town for the day and returns late, and pauses near the entrance to the house. He decides to grab an ax from the shed and finds his back door unlocked. He opens it and flashes the light on when he sees two of the sleators wrestling with the white humanoid blob. It runs into him and then out the door, followed by the two Sleators. The man closes the door and begins to panic and so he goes to Tom at the pub. He tells Tom what happens and the bartender sits him down and tells him that the Sleators all die twice, that the living ones have to capture the dead and kill them again. Tom tells him, though, that everyone says that a goat has escaped and that’s the story that the man should listen to.