Congratulations. If you are here reading the newspaper, the world probably didn’t end when the calendar clicked over to the unholy date. If you’re reading from a fallout shelter, buried beneath a mile of ash, I thank you for your commitment to this column. And I’ll give you a hundred bucks for that bottle of water and just one Dorito.

Not that I’ll make light of something more than a few people feared would mark the end of the world. I tell myself: It’s only a number, as rigid and unchanging as any other. But that number has cast a spell over the minds of men since biblical times.

I will never scoff at powers I don’t understand, and the workings of the past and the future are among them. There was a time when the date 9/11 meant nothing of significance. Now, it is a grouping of numbers we will remember with unhappy clarity into our doddering years.

And so, having survived the diabolical date, I’m here with the same questions I had the day before yesterday. Why is the number 666 so commonly regarded as the number of the beast? And if we accept that it is, superstitiously, historically or otherwise, who is the beast that we fear?

I have always been troubled by the notion of the devil. When I was a boy, an older friend told me that the creaking and groaning from the attic on particularly cold nights were the sounds of the devil on the prowl. And for a solid year, my eyes snapped open every time there was such a sound from above. I wondered if the devil were up there and if so, what he might want in this strange hour.

I was still a boy when I saw “The Omen” for the first time. I was thrilled and horrified by the idea of the devil returning to the world in the form of a small boy. I was also introduced to the idea that His Wickedness would always be found with that sinister number upon him.

I raced home after the movie and planted myself in front of a mirror with a flashlight and a comb. For a half hour, I checked the entire surface of my scalp, making sure I did not carry the mark of the beast.

OK, so I was a strange boy.

But there is nothing strange about the innate fear of evil. When you’re a kid, evil is a horned, red devil or a fanged ogre living in your closet. The representation changes over time, but your notion of evil and what it does remains largely unaltered.

You learn about the Holocaust in school and ponder the wickedness of the men who conducted it. You see a picture of Adolph Hitler and wonder if that might be the devil, after all, one without the spiked tail and the pitchfork.

You read about cruel and gory acts committed by people named Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy, and suddenly that little twerp from “The Omen” doesn’t seem so frightening.

You read about people who rape, torture and kill for sport and sooner or later it dawns on you that the person to fear probably doesn’t breathe fire or walk on cloven hooves. The idea develops that maybe truly evil men reside in ordinary neighborhoods rather than in some fiery place on the other side of the river Styx.

If you quantify evil by the administration of pain and misery, you don’t need to wander beyond city limits to find it. But as you sort these things out on your own, there will always be other people to muddy your perspective.

One group will tell you that a cold-blooded killer was not evil by himself. Evil is orchestrated by Satan, they will say, and so the devil made him do it.

Another group will sit and clinically describe the workings of mental illness, as brought upon by environment and bad genetics. The kidnapping rapist was driven, not by Beelzebub, they will say, but by factors altogether out of the madman’s control.

The concept of evil gets further diluted and more difficult to understand each time it is examined. And so, it is easy to understand why there are those who prefer to assign the horned beast as the face of evil and 666 as its number. It’s easier that way. It’s easier to fear the devil and his recognizable signature than to wonder and worry about every new person who moves in next door.

And so, while I won’t downplay the small hysteria over June 6, 2006, I will also suggest that the calendar is not the place to go looking for evil. The small square on a glossy page with kittens at the top probably won’t bring you much menace. I won’t make such predictions with the same confidence about the stranger you meet in a dark parking lot.

This pragmatic side of me, a miracle in itself, is not absolute. I am given to wild imaginings and superstition as much as the next guy. And while I was writing the final paragraphs of this column, my computer inexplicably seized up and went dark. It did so in a petulant way, as though angry and vengeful over my assumptions.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. You can e-mail him at [email protected].