Desperate to stay alive for the sake of his nine-year-old grandson, an elderly, near-penniless Jew on the brink of death pins his hopes for salvation on the coming of the Messiah.
In a tale of an old Welsh funerary custom, a devastating famine forces a young boy to play the part of a sin-eater at a dead man's wake. His duties: to cleanse the departed of sin by feasting in the presence of his corpse.
Bradley Manning kills a woman who threatened to expose their affair to Bradley's wife. When Bradley returns from vacation, someone threatens him with exposure unless Bradley brings $10,000 to a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.
An author and his lovely wife move into an old big house left to them by his late uncle Zachariah on the condition that they are never to open a mysterious trunk there that someone will come for. The house starts driving them insane.
A black-sheep nephew murders his ailing uncle for the inheritance only to find some disturbing changes in the old man's painting of the family graveyard.